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1. The Digital Turn in Textual Scholarship Historical and Typological Perspectives Odd Einar Haugen and Daniel Apollon Three Perspectives This chapter is written under the assumption that the history of textual scholarship from its very beginnings to the digital age can be understood from three perspectives. These perspectives are not the perspectives of the historian who tries to grasp the development of textual scholarship, but rather the perspectives held by the practitioners of the art and science of editing texts, for scholars who edit, comment, and analyze texts written by other people. This chapter assumes that editors may choose to look backward, outward, or inward. First, looking backward means to search for the origin of the text and to trace its development through time. When dealing with classical and medieval works, the editor has to track the process of copying, starting with the original text and then moving on from one copy to the next. When dealing with postGutenberg texts, the editor needs to trace the development from the first drafts made by the author until the end product, usually a printed edition. Second, looking outward means to view the text as a product situated in a sociohistorical context. This implies that its contents, its use, and its organic relationship to other texts and sociocultural realities is of greater interest than its origin and material transmission. Third, looking inward implies viewing the text as an individual expression of its own right, as a self-contained document, to be read and understood on its intrinsic merits. One of the characteristics of texts and literature, highlighted by the New Criticism in literary studies in the 1950s, is the existence of multiple layers of meaning and of a wealth of interpretations. The approach defended in this chapter reflects the belief that the self-contained nature of texts, as advocated by this New Criticism (looking inward), and the awareness of the organic relationship of texts to their world (looking outward) can benefit from a historical approach to the text and its transmission (looking backward). The purpose of this chapter is to show how these three perspectives may shape digital text scholarship. The tripartite view outlined above is, of course, a simplification, and it is not intended to be a scheme in a Hegelian sense for the actual history and development of textual scholarship. It includes, rather, three aspects that have been differently weighted in the practice of textual scholars over the years, to the extent that these perspectives can be seen as competing but not mutually exclusive points of orientation. Any scholar who primarily looks toward the origin of a text and tries to chart its development will understand and acknowledge the fact that each stage of the text also has a contemporaneous setting and interpretation and will indeed exploit such contextual knowledge. Any scholar focusing on the setting of a text, on its Sitz im Leben (German: literally, its “setting in life”), or its uses is well aware that the text also has a material history and a physical aspect.1 This chapter takes a broad look at the history of textual scholarship with these perspectives in mind. While the history of textual scholarship is commonly traced back to the birth of Western philology in the Hellenistic age, shaped and cultivated in the Library of Alexandria, the starting point here is the methodological foundation of textual scholarship in the early nineteenth century. This does not mean that the long history of textual scholarship in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, or indeed in early modern times should be disregarded as “prescientific ,” but that major approaches to textual scholarship, in print and online, can be exemplified and discussed with reference to scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Looking Backward: The Formalist Approach The conception of modern textual criticism is commonly thought of as belonging to Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) and his generation of editors in the first half of the nineteenth century. Lachmann’s work covered all three major fields of editorial philology—classical philology, Bible philology, and medieval ­ philology—and thus has become a point of reference in all of these fields. Lachmann expressed clearly the basic tenets of a scientific textual criticism very early in his career in a critical review published in 1817 of Friedrich von der Hagen’s edition of Der Nibelungen Lied (1816). Lachmann claimed that the editor should search for the original version of the text, or, if that was unattainable, for as close an approximation to the...

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