ABSTRACT
Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass claim I misrepresent them. They don’t want to displace literary study, just accommodate it to the disciplinary assumptions and knowledge derived from a materialist history of printing. But there are many passages in ‘The materiality of the Shakespearean text’ that suggest otherwise, including the one I quoted from the very beginning (declaring that ‘Shakespeare studies will never be the same’ as a result of recent breakthroughs in their preferred mode of work, ‘a radical change indeed’ from what it was) and another I quoted from the very end (urging us to ‘take our minds off’ an authorbased literary study and to shift over from ‘this impoverished ghostly thing’ to ‘the complex social practices’ that produce paper, which ‘practices should be the objects not only of our labors but also of our desires’). Such statements represent the spirit not of accommodation but displacement. Whatever de Grazia and Stallybrass’s intentions (Holderness, Loughrey and Murphy leave no doubt as to theirs), the consequence of accepting their argument would be, precisely, to abandon literary study, for it is impossible to centre work in the theory and history of a disciplinary practice and at the same time perform the practice. This is why historiographers and nuts-and-bolts historians frequently distrust each other, even when they recognize their own interdependence; this is why theoretical and experimental physicists sometimes wish to streamline their departments into more manageable coherence. I am not claiming that different practitioners cannot talk to and learn from each other; of course we can, and we do. But the learning is normally fed back into the disciplinary assumptions and procedures from which we start. When de Grazia claims that ‘it is a major triumph of this latest generation of critics to have effectively crossed the Great Divide, now concerning themselves with textual matters once relegated exclusively to the editor and bibliographer’, she is describing not accommodation, in which practitioners return to their own territory potentially enriched by the experience of travel (a routine ‘critics, editorsand bibliographers’ have been performing since well before ‘this
latestgeneration’), but immigration: a one-way trip to a different land, involving the renunciation of one kind of disciplinary allegiance in favour ofanother.
