Editing as Cultural Formation

I have recently been trying to understand the work of bibliographers and editors. I undertook this “retraining” for two contradictory but related reasons. The first was that as I became increasingly engaged in the teaching and organization of Cultural Studies courses, I began to wonder what the strengths of specific disciplinary trainings might be. That is, one of the obvious dangers of interdisciplinary work is that one ends up doing history, anthropology, economics—badly. It is hard to gather the technical skills of another discipline on the side: the historical skills, for instance, of finding sources, let alone knowing how to read them. I began to wonder what exactly the technical skills of someone teaching in a department of English might be. Whatever they were, I didn't seem to know about them, or have them. (By contrast, I did have at least the rudiments of an historical training through having worked with various historians in England.) I found that the librarians at the University of Pennsylvania had an extraordinaiy range of skills which, as someone who worked on and with books, I felt I should know. The second reason for my turn to editing and bibliography was that I came to believe that the material culture of books was central to any cultural analysis of “literature” and therefore to one aspect of Cultural Studies. ¹ Questions of, for instance, the formation of nationalism (and national languages), of the construction of the individual, of the making of genders and sexualities are materially embedded in the historical production and reproduction of texts.