Tue Jan 21 13:18:58 1997
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Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 09:16:15 -0500
From: Patrick Durusau
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Subject: Re: The Original Text
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Actually I counted to something higher than 10 before deciding to reply
briefly to Hurtado's comments on deconstructionism.
A sampling of his remarks is enough to reveal the tone of his post:
>
> I think we'd all better take a deep breath, count to 10, and be
> *very* careful before we follow Derrida, et al. down that
> "deconstructionist" road. There lies madness!
> Radical
> postmodernist views of texts/communication does to the process what
> auto-eroticism is to real sex, reducing it to readers playing with
> themselves instead of the much more exciting adventure of exploring
> and getting to enjoy another!
One of the literary critics who I assume Hurtado would include in his
et. al. is Stanley Fish. Interested text critics might want to read his
_Is There a Text in This Class_ and _Doing What Comes Naturally_ before
accepting these remarks as reasons to dismiss deconstructionism as
unworthy of their attention.
Hurtado also says:
> But none of
> these data in any way logically or historically falsifies the fact
> that each book was written before it was copied, or modified, or
> edited. And the person(s) who wrote the text was/were the "author",
> with real *authorial intentions*, however much the transmission and
> reading process makes it difficult for such intentions to come to
> realization clearly.
I have not read any postmodernist critic that denies that books are
indeed written by authors. It is the leap from this physical "fact" to
a reading of the text that claims to have the same epistemological class
as the fact of writing that causes concern. The "text" as artifact is
different from the "text" as read. One is simply a question of the
existence of some type of writing material with certain marks on it, a
determination that can be made without regard to the ability to read the
message. The other is a question of interpreting the marks that appear
on the writing material and what epistemological claims can be made for
those interpretations. (Yes, I would argue that there are no readings
that are not interpretations within "interpretive communities." See the
works cited above by Stanley Fish. The notion that some readings are
self-evident or resisted simply by those who refuse to see the clear
evidence seeks to avoid an examination of underlying epistemology of the
claimant.)
> Now, can we get on/back to textual criticism and other historical
> questions that are not the anti-human/humane dead-ends that
> deconstructionism represents?
I do not think that textual criticism can claim to be a "historical
question" unless text critics are simply concerned with "texts" as
artifacts. (I am ignoring for this discussion the abandonment of the
"history as given" model by historians.) Most of the text critics on
this list are concerned with not only the "text" as artifact but also
with its relationship to other texts and ultimately, an interpretation
of the text. Postmodernist literary criticism does not mean that text
critics must/should abandon their favorite techniques or methods. It
does mean that textual critics should examine the epistemology that
underlies claims to know the meaning of a text when it was written,
considering that the text was written in a 2nd language of the critic,
some 1900 years more or less ago, in completely different social and
cultural settings and preserved only in incomplete copies.
Patrick
Patrick Durusau
Information Technology
Scholars Press
pdurusau@emory.edu
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