The Current Conditions of Textual Scholarship and CanonicityTextual Scholarship and Canonicity: A HistoryFinding the Ties That Bind Textual Scholarship and CanonicityWorks CitedJohn BowenEnglish 401: Intro to Grad StudiesDr. StricklandShort paper: Literary Texts and Canons27 September 1999You will not find on these pages an elegant essay on textual scholarship and canonicity. Instead, you will find a student trying to come to grips with these two subjects, which at times seem unrelated, or distantly related at best. Not helping matters is my personal history of English studies. My undergraduate educationin English did not address textual scholarship at all; and although I read canonical works as an undergrad, I did not study issues of canonization and learned about the canon debate only in passing. So if it seems I’m playing catch-up here, it’s because I am.The Current Conditions of Textual Scholarship and CanonicityOf the two areas of study, textual scholarship seems to be the more stable. The theories which have supported textual scholarship seem to have changed slowly, and current textual theory seems to be making its way into the discipline of textual scholarship only by degrees. The waters of textual scholarship appear to be relatively calm, though some significant changes may be predicted for the not-too-distant future. I will discuss these later.Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the issue of canons and canonicity has been a raging debate inEnglish studies for about 20 years, and it seems the debate will go on. Contemporary English scholars havequestioned canons and canonicity from many angles, and all the questions have not yet been answered. Theorists have speculated on how canons are made; whether a literary canon is useful in any way; whether canons are inevitable in one form or another; whether the literary canon is a tool of repression, and if so, what is the nature of its repression; whether it would be preferable to retain, expand or eliminate the literarycanon; who or what is responsible for creation of the canon; what can or should replace the canon at the center of English studies; and the list goes on.Today, the debate has reached a point where some of the criticism is not being directed at canons and canonicity; but instead, at the canon debate itself. Questions such as: Have critics of the literary canon misplaced their criticism--should they focus their criticism on curricula rather than the canon? (Docherty 167) Does today’s debate about the canon present a real crisis in the field of English studies, or have we simply reached another point in history where the old ideas (as represented by the canon) no longer have the relevance they once did and it’s time to reach out for new ideas that will meet our present and future cultural needs? (Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon, 8) Have canon-critics misunderstood human nature in arguing that readers should not attempt to judge texts, so that they might not fall prey to making decisions about “aesthetic value” that inevitably lead to canon-creation? (Guillory xiv)Textual Scholarship and Canonicity: A HistoryAs far as the history of textual scholarship is concerned, I won’t go into much detail, for two reasons:1. D.C. Greetham has already done a good job outlining the history of textual scholarship in his essay “Textual Scholarship” in our Gibaldi text.2. In the field of textual scholarship, changes have happened slowly, and there have been relatively few major developments in the field, most of which have occurred within the last 200 years. These major developments include the dispute between eclecticism vs. geneticism, the New Bibliography, and “social textual criticism.” All of these are explained clearly in Greetham’s essay.The important thing that seems to arise from the history of textual scholarship is the contemporary recognition that textual scholarship is essentially an act of literary criticism (Greetham 122). Thus we seean intersection between the stodgy world of textual scholarship and the quick-moving field of critical theory.As a result of this intersection, both current and future textual theories will almost certainly have an impact on textual scholarship. For one thing, eclectic editing seems doomed. In today’s critical environment, it seems hard to support the notion that a single editor can painstakingly recreate an author’s intentions and produce an ideal eclectic text that can serve as “a norm against which other copies...may be checked” (Williams and Abbott 8).In addition, technological changes promise to bring even more changes to the field of textual scholarship. The full range of possibilities (and problems) of electronic texts have yet to be fully explored. One can only imagine what sort of texts may be produced in the future, or how past and present texts may be alteredin a new, electronic environment. These are important issues that textual scholars will have to deal with; and, as I will argue later, their handling of these issues may have an impact on canonicity in the future.In terms of the history of canons and canonicity, there seems to be broad disagreement among scholars about how today’s literary canon was created. In our Gibaldi textbook, Robert Scholes argues that:By the end of the 19th century two simultaneous processes (or two facets of the same process) had led to the establishment of a literary canon. One of these was the separate, superior status claimedfor works of verbal imagination, which, thus empowered, constituted a literary canon. The other was the professionalization of teaching in the newly established (and in particular the American) universities and graduate schools (146).However, other scholars point to different developments as crucial in the creation of the contemporary literary canon. In The Making of the Modern Canon, Jan Gorak describes a common conviction among critics of the canon: that the literary canon was created out of a friendly political arrangement among academics, publishers, reviewers and others who have had an interest in maintaining current cultural and political institutions. He summarizes Jane Tompkins’ and Richard Brodhead’s studies of the canonization of Nathaniel Hawthorne, declaring that Tompkins’ and Brodhead’s “demystification of canon formation...has uncovered a complex system of promotion, publicity, and politics” (2).Gorak himself, however,