The MLA, Old English and all

MLA President, Marianne Hirsch, wrote to the Old English Division of the Association on 28 March 2013. On behalf of the Executive Council, she asked us the following, among other things: 'Given the disproportionate number of divisions in English in relation to other fields like African and East Asian, would you consider consolidating with Middle English Language and Literature, Excluding Chaucer and with Chaucer? What would such a division be called? Old and Middle English? Early English?' The Old English committee replied that we wanted no such consolidation.

Now, almost a decade ago, I argued for a more nuanced approach to periodization, with its arbitrary categories creating strange literary and linguistic lacunae (http://www.academia.edu/1374101/Editorial). For research purposes, and even for teaching (especially in the undergraduate program), it is useful to cut through swathes of time, to juxtapose and reconfigure in ways that narrower foci of single periods might not obviously permit. Yet, there's a great deal to be said about concentrated study, if that study is framed by peripheral vision.

Salisbury Cathedral Library 150: Gallican Psalter and Gloss

Still, though, I cannot agree to a request from a professional association to conflate, collapse, concertina a thousand years of English literatures, languages, and cultures into one. The letter that the Division wrote in response (here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/168368943174422/597913600219952/) gave a number of very good reasons to maintain the distinctiveness of Old and Middle English, and all are compelling. One of them, though, has a significance that is easy to miss: it's the #5 in the letter, the 'Professional' reason, which states that 'MLA Divisions in English Literature tend to mirror hiring specialties'. I think, perhaps, that 'mirror' is the most politic way of putting it. I wonder if, in fact, in some economically constrained and resource-light English Departments, the MLA's divisions and trends don't actually contribute to/drive/impel/suggest particular hiring specialties?

For this reason, as well as many others, the MLA has an influence that is actually quite astonishing when one thinks about it (and this is to say nothing of the job lists, which, as a British academic, I find bizarrely centralized in schedule and format, and utterly brutal in implementation). My view of a professional association is that such a body exists principally to encourage a love of its subject and to assist its subject's practitioners; that it seeks to support and defend and lobby; that it helps to provide useful meeting places, tools, and contacts for its members. And that would be all its members: from a hard-core Anglo-Saxonist (whoop!) to a contemporary digital theorist; from an African-American literature scholar to a Slavic linguistics PhD student. All the members, MLA. All of them.

Textual Sifting

Textual Fulfilment. Using most of Peter Barry's textual categories--cotext, context, multitext, epitext, peritext, and so on (see Barry, 'Rethinking Textuality in Literary Studies Today', Literature Compass 7. 11 [November 2010], pp. 999-1008 [DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00758.x])--it is possible to analyse TEXT as the superordinate of a semantic field. Barry's terms, like the branches of a family tree, emerge from the superordinate and create a set of methods for approaching textual fulfilment. But, like further offspring, categories of 'textness'--the written word, the spoken word, the image-text, the digital text--can either be grouped together under each of Barry's sets, or, can form whole new branches of their own. In an act of Divergent Thinking, my students have been engaged in designing mind-maps for text that permit a glance into the potential for interpreting text in all its fullness.  Here's a snippet of one:

Textual Priorities. What is also becoming clear through detailed analysis is that different authors+text can be allied, because of particular shared elements of 'textness' that emerge from close study of them. It's probably obvious, but Shakespeare and Walt Whitman (apparently sometimes called 'America's Shakespeare', which is a bit sad: why can't he just be America's Whitman?) share the numinous textual element of 'authorial fetishization'. This might, perhaps, be akin to visceral 'aura', something that we have been trying, unsuccessfully, to pin down, though Kendall O'Brien's 'experience' is an astute attempt at definition.

Textual Sifting. Of most significance with these authors, and others who are similarly a permanent part of the canon, it is their being THE author that, in a sense, surpasses even their literary oeuvres: oeuvres with all the attendant problems of 'what is the text' of Leaves of Grass or The Merchant of Venice? In these case, and others like them--Beowulf, Chaucer, Milton perhaps, Dickinson--the overwhelming priority in terms of 'textness' is the cult of the author. Clearly, in the case of Beowulf, the cult of the author means the cult of 'Anonymous', and I think that while we'd all like to know the date of that poem, no one wants to know who might feasibly be called the author/s, because part of its cult is its unknowability, its lack of compositional and authorial context. Not all works share the priority of Authorship (or Intentionality), though: more of those next time.

The Origin of Texts

The OED, s.v. 'origin', describes this as

the act or fact of beginning, or of springing from something; beginning of existence with reference to source or cause; rise or first manifestation

Under this same entry, 1b., the citations include the following from 1867: J. McCosh Method Divine Govt. (ed. 9) iii. ii. 377, 'The origin of evil, like every other beginning, shrouds itself in darkness'. Perhaps this 'darkness' about the origin of everything is most apt to discussions of textual genesis.

Seemingly conversely, though, the OED's meaning 2a, reveals 'origin' as

a. That from which anything originates, or is derived; source of being or existence; starting point. Now freq. in pl.

Trying to untangle these two proximate definitions of 'origin' is headache-inducing, and yet, in textual studies, the 'origin' can take on an, arguably, extraordinary and disproportionate significance. For textual critics, especially those trained in the classics or early literatures, determining the 'origin', the Ur-text, the fons is the goal of the editor. Interesting debates in the 1990s emerged among the traditional philologists (see, for example, the essays in D. G. Scragg and P. E. Szarmach, eds., Editing Old English [Brewer, 1994]) and the new philologists (P. Zumthor [Towards a Medieval Poetics], B. Cerquiglini [In Praise of the Variant] Stephen Nicholls [The New Philology]). The issue at stake was how to present the text. At the risk of oversimplifying complex arguments, it is the debate about whether to present a reconstructed, hypothetical proto-text that best illustrates the author's intended text (see the rationale of the Piers Plowman Project here: http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/) or whether to privilege the variant, or at least given the variant its long overdue sustained consideration (also part of the remit of the Piers Plowman venture). For many editors, treading a via media between these seemed preferable; for others, the argument for presenting simulacra, perhaps with en-face transcription, was a key desideratum. 

Turn-the-Page Display in the foyer of the British Library

At this point, and with very little real effect visible in the pbook or ebook presentation of scholarly critical editions, the debate has tailed off and has transformed into a debate about the nature of digital editing: how best to present a word-based or word- and image-based text on screen, utilising all the dynamic interface potential of the digital realm. Now, it is possible to have a manuscript version of a text, complete with a myriad of tools for interpreting and accessing not only that text, but all the co-texts almost simultaneously. None of this helps solve the issue of 'origin', though; how to access or present the 'original'. This is particularly the case when, as is most common in fact, the 'original' does not exist. Chaucer's original Wife of Bath's Tale does not survive, any more than an original version of Hamlet does. If 'origin' is the 'beginning of existence' or 'that from which anything originates', then authorial intentionality is surely the only origin for Text. Anything other than this is a remake, a version. Or is everything subsequent to the mental act an 'original' of its own? This might certainly permit us to account for the uniqueness of all text, particularly by virtue of its peculiar materiality. 

Perhaps more provocatively and fruitfully, though, we should go along with Cerquiglini and state with certainty that 'There is no such thing as originality'. We can say, then, that all texts are rendered equal and as such deserve individual study, sustained examination and a recognition of their own intrinsic value.