The Mapping of Meaning in Wordsworth’s “Michael”: (Textual Place, Textual Space and Spatialized Speech Acts)
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Sally Bushell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK. Her primary research interests are in British Romanticism, textual criticism and the form of the long poem. She is the author of Re-Reading The Excursion (2002) and Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dickinson (Virginia UP, 2009) as well as co-editor of the Cornell edition of The Excursion (2007). More recently she has begun to work on theories of space and place and their application to the literary work in all its textual manifestations.
Footnotes
1. See Bushell, “The Making of Meaning in Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere: (Speech Acts, Micro-Analysis and ‘Freudian Slips’),” SiR 48.3 (Fall 2009): 391–421.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) (henceforth PP), trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1962) 294.
3. For a fully historicized account of Romantic philosophies of language and speech act theory see Angela Esterhammer, The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and SiR, 49 (Spring 2010) German Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000). Her approach is very different from my own, which seeks to apply speech act theory to the interpretation of Romantic textuality.
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) 335.
5. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (henceforth PEL), trans. Stephen Rendall (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985) 93.
6. Michel de Certeau emphasizes from the outset that his concern lies with examining the practices of users as consumers. He is thus interested in one kind of “making” only—that of the experience involved at the time of participation in an act. In literary terms, he is interested in the “making” of the act of reading (“silent production”), but not in the “making” of the act of writing.
7. Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other (Oxford: Polity P, 1995) 183.
8. Certeau’s model appears dualistic but is not, in part because both place and space are experienced in the world (the third element) but also because of their ability to change each other. Merleau-Ponty’s account (itself looking back to Heidegger) allows for three kinds of space that could also be compared to Henri Lefebvre’s three notions of a “perceived space” (everyday), “conceived space” (theoretical) and “lived space” (fully experienced) in The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) and Edward Soja’s “trialectic” which seeks to connect the human dimensions of spatiality, historicality and sociality (Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places [Oxford: Blackwell, 1996]). More recent spatial theorists (such as Doreen Massey) deny the distinction altogether, but it remains helpful in relation to textual spatiality.
9. Thanks to Tim Fulford for reading a draft of this paper and reminding me of this point.
10. For the manuscript each page is unique because of its materiality. For a printed book, even though it is mass-produced, it also exists as an individual physical object, acquiring its own unique materiality (faded in the sun, annotated, coffee-stained etc.). For discussion of the distinction between the particular token and type in relation to literary texts see also James McLaverty, “The Concept of Authorial Intention in Textual Criticism,” The Library 6.2 (1984): 13 1–38. McLaverty uses a musical analogy to “regard the text as the score of the work” (127).
11. Although a personalized materiality can also accrue (see note above).
12. My thanks to James McLaverty for making this point to me in conversation.
13. Paul Eggert, Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009) 234.
14. “Document and Text: The ‘Life’ of the Literary Work and the Capacities of Editing,” TEXT 7 (1994): 1–14 (2).
15. James Butler and Karen Green, eds., Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800 by William Wordsworth (henceforth LB) (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1992) xxvi.
16. Pamela Woof, ed., Dorothy Wordsworth: The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals...
