ABSTRACT

A READER'S Response” is the most bibliographically peculiar piece I have ever written, and certainly the strangest I have ever decided to publish. And yet it exemplifies in several ways the current issues facing textuists of various stripes—intentionalist, social, annotative, and (of course) “reader-response.” I have been resistant to publishing it in this or any other venue, but have been persuaded (sometimes by force majeure—Tom Tanselle's having already discussed it in one of his five-year critiques of recent textual work [“Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology,” Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991)], esp. 129–30) that it could find its most useful context in a collection or narrative like Transgressions. Some background: In March 1987 the Society for Critical Exchange sponsored a symposium on “Textual Scholarship and Literary Theory” at Miami University, Ohio. Although I was then becoming deeply involved in the topic of the symposium (I had just completed “Literary and Textual Theory: Redrawing the Matrix” and was teaching textual theory to a group of very intelligent and provocative graduate students at CUNY), I was unable to attend the conference itself. But I heard reports: indirectly through participants like Peter Shillingsburg and those of my students who either attended or sent papers that had emerged out of my theory seminar, and directly from Art Casciato, who had helped organise the meeting and subsequently asked me to contribute to a volume of proceedings, in which I would act as final respondent to the papers given, and would therefore have access to the papers as Art had received them (I say “final” because much of the symposium had been made up of responses of various levels of formality).