ABSTRACT
WHEN MY Garland editor, Phyllis Korper, suggested I put together a book of essays, “A Suspicion of Texts” was not initially among those published pieces I had thought of including. Its audience was very different from the readership of the textual or critical journals in which my work usually appeared: the essay was commissioned by the Thesis, the magazine of my institution, the CUNY Graduate School and University Center, and the expected readers were thus both more general than I was used to (with thirty-two doctoral programs, from anthropology to theatre, CUNY covers a wide disciplinary ground) and at the same time more limited (my local community), or so I thought. As it turned out, this “popularisation” of textual studies for the general reader generated a greater response from colleagues in the textual world than any other essay I have written. From Tom Tanselle (in his five-year critique of textual activities for Studies in Bibliography) to Fredson Bowers (in correspondence in which he approved of much of what I had to say, but demurred about my suggestion that the first quarto of Hamlet might be “a Shakespearean experiment” because, in Fredson's judgement, “it has so much bad poetry”); from Jim Hall (in his essay on “Old English” for the MLA Scholarly Editing volume, picking up on a dichotomy I have used in much of my writing—Alexandrian analogy versus Pergamanian anomaly—and using it as a basic structural device for the various types of editing in Old English1) to Peter Shillingsburg in the October 1994 issue of Linq, the journal of the English Department of the James Cook University of North Queensland. In a wide-ranging and highly provocative essay on “Textual Angst” (raising my “suspicion,” which I characterised as a perfectly “normal,” if neurotic, psychological condition in editing to a paranormal, even psychotic aberration), Peter finds that my Thesis article sidesteps the question of “what [a text] will do” but instead “describes a variety of textual situations regarding uncertain authorship, textual variance, and uncertain agencies of textual intervention” (82). He then leaps from this perfectly proper characterisation of my essay to the imputation that my conclusion (that “a suspicion of texts is one of the fundamental requirements of the critical mind”) must mean that Stanley Fish (whose question “Is There a Text in This Class?” “dismisses both text and author from the classroom” [82]) “must, therefore, lack this fundamental requirement of a critical mind… which may be true, but it leaves the challenge of literary theory unmet, for texts do the things Greetham outlines only if the author or intending agency somehow matters, and that is the question at issue” (83).
