Interweave 11: [Textual] Criticism and De construction

THE VERY TYPOGRAPHY OF “[Textual] Criticism and Deconstruction” is both familiar and disturbing to textual critics. Editors have long used the square bracket, either in pairs to signify interpolated or editorial material, or singly as a separator between the editorial reading and those of other witnesses recorded in the apparatus. We “do” brackets with such familiarity and ease that, for critics like Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson the editorial bracket represents precisely what is wrong with textual scholarship: it is a symptom of the “barbed wire” that editors (or “professors” as Wilson preferred to call us) erected between the common reader and the text, a mark of the clerisy that attempts to make classic texts unreadable to all but an initiated priestly caste.¹ Similar charges have been made against post-structuralist critics: that their graphic games and de-formations of the text (différence, arché-écriture) make the text inhospitable to the ordinary reader. But we textual scholars do not admit such devices into the titles of our work: we do not openly and graphically draw attention to our deformations.