Introduction

Beginning in 2008 the English Institute turned to certain “building blocks” of literary study as topics for the annual conferences. “Text,” the topic of 2012, was the fifth of these “building blocks” (the topics of the previous four conferences were “Periodization,” “Genre,” “Author,” and “Reading”; following “Text,” the English Institute chose “Form” for the 2013 conference). The purpose of returning to these “building blocks” was to promote reflection on how such fundamental critical categories are challenged and transformed under new theoretical pressures. They may persist as references in dynamic theoretical environments, remaining central to our thinking as literary scholars; but as our discipline expands, their conceptual fixity is not assured.

Literary scholars have long taken text to be the object of study.¹ Yet with the conceptual breadth that has come to characterize notions of text and textuality, literary criticism has found itself at a confluence of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, history, politics, and law. Thus, for example, notions of cultural text and social text have placed literary study in productive dialogue with fields in the social sciences. Moreover, text has come to stand for different and often contradictory things: linguistic data for philology; the unfolding “real time” of interaction for sociolinguistics; the problems of copy-text and markup in editorial theory; the objectified written work (“verbal icon”) for New Criticism; in some versions of poststructuralism the horizons of language that overcome the closure of the work; in theater studies the other of performance, ambiguously artifact and event. “Text” has been the subject of venerable traditions of scholarship centered on the establishment and critique of scriptural authority as well as the classical heritage. In the modern world it figures anew in the regulation of intellectual property. Has text become, or was it always, an ideal, immaterial object, a conceptual site for the investigation of knowledge, ownership and propriety, or authority? If so, what then is, or ever was, a “material” text? What institutions, linguistic procedures, commentary forms, and interpretive protocols stabilize text as an object of study?

The seven speakers who presented papers at the 2012 English Institute devoted to “Text” explored the historical and contemporary challenges of—and to—this critical category. From the productive ambiguities of medieval and early modern textualities to more recent detachments from and recontextualizations of the textual object in literature, theory, theater studies, and anthropology, the speakers considered how “text” remains always at once present and ineluctable. Five of those papers are published here; we were also grateful for the presentations of Gauri Viswanathan (“Heterodoxy and Textuality: Reading the Exoteric, Retrieving the Esoteric”) and Rebecca Schwartz (“Acting in Ruins”), who were unable to contribute to the published proceedings.

The papers that follow circumscribe a long arc in the history of the notion of a text. Yet the various scholars who have contributed essays to this dossier in ELH are agreed in thinking of texts as something more than the words and pages and bindings of authoritative copyrighted editions. Mary Carruthers opens her discussion with a comment on the topic statement that invited her and other participants to “consider how ‘texts’ are institutionally ‘stabilized’ as ‘objects of study’” and on the image used in the publicity photo for the session: “an image of a heavily inked bit of printed paper, set in starkly contrasting red and black margins” drawn from the work of Glenn Ligon. How, she wondered, is “the text an object at all,” and when a text “inked aggressively into illegibility except for the lone word ‘not’” becomes an art object as it does in the example of Ligon’s work on the poster, how does such an image of a text “connect . . . to a medieval page image”?

The answers she gives involved a vigorous depiction of medieval texts and textualization through the example of the “‘Troilus Frontispiece,’ a painting of around 1420, placed opposite the beginning of an especially beautiful manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.” Arguing that studies of textuality have all too frequently and misleadingly revolved around the technological divide instituted by the invention of the printing press, she stresses that medieval texts and their illustrations continued to have...