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Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism
How might it be that works of art and literature are not just made, but unmade, remade, and made over? Joseph Grigely argues that it is the very nature of art to incorporate change by editors and conservators, and as it is resituated in different publications and exhibition sites. Asserting that the common editorial practice of creating eclectic texts is essentially a eugenic practice based on Romanticism's desire for racial and textual purity, Grigely reconceives the notion of textual difference, or textualterity.
Grigely draws not only on a wide range of cultural transformations in nineteenth--and twentieth-century literature-- including Thomas Bowdler's 1818 edition of Shakespeare and the Reader's Digest condensed edition of Tom Sawyer --but on a detailed exploration of recent controversies in the arts to argue for the need to understand these textual transformations as fundamental cultural phenomena. In a concluding chapter devoted to Jackson Pollock's Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) , Grigely shows how the title and the media of Pollock's painting have been changed (by friends, curators, and an inch-long cicada) in ways that ultimately affect our conceptualization of the work of art as a timeless object.
By moving between the scholarly territory of textual research and the critical territory of contemporary conceptual art, Grigely creates a transdisciplinary discourse that engages current discussions on framing, authorial intentions, collaborative authorship, and moral rights. Textualterity will be essential reading for textual critics, art historians and theorists, and students of cultural theory and history.
Joseph Grigely is Associate Professor of Art, University of Michigan.
How might it be that works of art and literature are not just made, but unmade, remade, and made over? Joseph Grigely argues that it is the very nature of art to incorporate change by editors and conservators, and as it is resituated in different publications and exhibition sites. Asserting that the common editorial practice of creating eclectic texts is essentially a eugenic practice based on Romanticism's desire for racial and textual purity, Grigely reconceives the notion of textual difference, or textualterity.
Grigely draws not only on a wide range of cultural transformations in nineteenth--and twentieth-century literature-- including Thomas Bowdler's 1818 edition of Shakespeare and the Reader's Digest condensed edition of Tom Sawyer --but on a detailed exploration of recent controversies in the arts to argue for the need to understand these textual transformations as fundamental cultural phenomena. In a concluding chapter devoted to Jackson Pollock's Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) , Grigely shows how the title and the media of Pollock's painting have been changed (by friends, curators, and an inch-long cicada) in ways that ultimately affect our conceptualization of the work of art as a timeless object.
By moving between the scholarly territory of textual research and the critical territory of contemporary conceptual art, Grigely creates a transdisciplinary discourse that engages current discussions on framing, authorial intentions, collaborative authorship, and moral rights. Textualterity will be essential reading for textual critics, art historians and theorists, and students of cultural theory and history.
Joseph Grigely is Associate Professor of Art, University of Michigan.
Grigely draws not only on a wide range of cultural transformations in nineteenth--and twentieth-century literature-- including Thomas Bowdler's 1818 edition of Shakespeare and the Reader's Digest condensed edition of Tom Sawyer --but on a detailed exploration of recent controversies in the arts to argue for the need to understand these textual transformations as fundamental cultural phenomena. In a concluding chapter devoted to Jackson Pollock's Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) , Grigely shows how the title and the media of Pollock's painting have been changed (by friends, curators, and an inch-long cicada) in ways that ultimately affect our conceptualization of the work of art as a timeless object.
By moving between the scholarly territory of textual research and the critical territory of contemporary conceptual art, Grigely creates a transdisciplinary discourse that engages current discussions on framing, authorial intentions, collaborative authorship, and moral rights. Textualterity will be essential reading for textual critics, art historians and theorists, and students of cultural theory and history.
Joseph Grigely is Associate Professor of Art, University of Michigan.
How might it be that works of art and literature are not just made, but unmade, remade, and made over? Joseph Grigely argues that it is the very nature of art to incorporate change by editors and conservators, and as it is resituated in different publications and exhibition sites. Asserting that the common editorial practice of creating eclectic texts is essentially a eugenic practice based on Romanticism's desire for racial and textual purity, Grigely reconceives the notion of textual difference, or textualterity.
Grigely draws not only on a wide range of cultural transformations in nineteenth--and twentieth-century literature-- including Thomas Bowdler's 1818 edition of Shakespeare and the Reader's Digest condensed edition of Tom Sawyer --but on a detailed exploration of recent controversies in the arts to argue for the need to understand these textual transformations as fundamental cultural phenomena. In a concluding chapter devoted to Jackson Pollock's Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) , Grigely shows how the title and the media of Pollock's painting have been changed (by friends, curators, and an inch-long cicada) in ways that ultimately affect our conceptualization of the work of art as a timeless object.
By moving between the scholarly territory of textual research and the critical territory of contemporary conceptual art, Grigely creates a transdisciplinary discourse that engages current discussions on framing, authorial intentions, collaborative authorship, and moral rights. Textualterity will be essential reading for textual critics, art historians and theorists, and students of cultural theory and history.
Joseph Grigely is Associate Professor of Art, University of Michigan.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 1996
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September 1, 2024
Introduction: In expanding our conceptual understanding of materiality it has become clear that the material expression of literature, to some degree, coexists and interrelates. The argument is that the material basis of a literary work and larger questions regarding how, and in what contexts, language means are linked by a work's material expression.
Review: ‘Textualterity’ echoes the foretasted approach when the author presents a thorough account of the glitches faced by textual criticism, arguing that the appeal of a textual object 'is precisely its ability to dislocate itself from a condition of fixedness, thereby metonymizing that which it represents... Textual criticism has historically worked in the opposite direction... towards fixedness. This impetus in textual criticism is based upon several fundamental beliefs, among which is the assumed inerrability of language and of texts.
However, when material considerations are deliberated as part of this process, Grigely contends, the situation alters: 'A reprint, one might say, is motivated: it does not necessarily exist for the same reasons as that of which it is a reprint.
From this he concludes:
‘Instead of viewing literature, or artworks, as finished productions we might instead view them as works of fluxion that experience stasis or duration in a particular edition or a particular exhibition space. Yet, what is particular about a particular edition or a particular exhibition space is ultimately undermined by its instability: it is particular only in our conceptualization of it as such, not by virtue of its implied or physical context. For [Jerome] McGann there are no final or finished works, but only final or finished texts.’
While Grigely's stress upon the eventual unpredictability of a literary work (or indeed a work of art) requires a more nuanced account, and indeed critique, we must agree with its general thrust.
Take the example of a destabilizing political novel written by a rebellious author living under an authoritarian regime. The work is written, published and very quickly banned by the government. Such a work might only be circulated within the country as illegal photocopied scripts. But that same novel, smuggled out by a compassionate foreigner, is concomitantly translated and published as a sleek paperback in another country. There is a gulf in the meaning embodied by these two material expressions and by the socio-cultural motivations at play in each instance.
Conclusion: Let us end on a slightly different note. Realizing some of the cul-de-sac of his proposal Mallarme began to conceive of the page as space, a white abyss that challenged the writer and which would be filled through spatial composition rather than just literary.
He positioned the letter as the basic unit for composition. literature and the page as the score of a musical composition, an approach which influenced his understanding of le Liver He wanted to scatter the structure of the quotidian book and destroy its reliance upon columns, text blocks and other standard typographical devices: Mallarme was attempting a synthesis between a philosophical vision of the book as an expansive instrument of the spirit and the capacity of its physical forms to embody thought in new visual arrangements.
Reframing this notion, we might say his idealised material expression for literature as a spatial composition on the white abyss of the page was a direct response to his material basis for literature, namely its attempt to embody pure thought. Ironically, the technology and cultural attitudes required to implement this vision were to follow his death: the definitive printed edition of UN coup de was only published in 1914 (the work was written in 1895 and first published in 1897).
To derive such a pragmatic response from Mallarme's ethereal musings might seem reductive. But my central point is that Mallarme's work, in conceiving the page as a white abyss for the performance of language as the embodiment of pure thought, challenges some of the fundamental ways in which we conceive the space of literature
A materialist analysis of Mallarme fleshes out how any thinking about what poetry - or indeed literature or language - might lead to a revision of how such language-objects are embodied and consumed. In this media and discourse-rich age, it also leads us to call into question the notion that all imaginable existence must eventually be contained in a book. After all, ‘it begins in the book’.
Review: ‘Textualterity’ echoes the foretasted approach when the author presents a thorough account of the glitches faced by textual criticism, arguing that the appeal of a textual object 'is precisely its ability to dislocate itself from a condition of fixedness, thereby metonymizing that which it represents... Textual criticism has historically worked in the opposite direction... towards fixedness. This impetus in textual criticism is based upon several fundamental beliefs, among which is the assumed inerrability of language and of texts.
However, when material considerations are deliberated as part of this process, Grigely contends, the situation alters: 'A reprint, one might say, is motivated: it does not necessarily exist for the same reasons as that of which it is a reprint.
From this he concludes:
‘Instead of viewing literature, or artworks, as finished productions we might instead view them as works of fluxion that experience stasis or duration in a particular edition or a particular exhibition space. Yet, what is particular about a particular edition or a particular exhibition space is ultimately undermined by its instability: it is particular only in our conceptualization of it as such, not by virtue of its implied or physical context. For [Jerome] McGann there are no final or finished works, but only final or finished texts.’
While Grigely's stress upon the eventual unpredictability of a literary work (or indeed a work of art) requires a more nuanced account, and indeed critique, we must agree with its general thrust.
Take the example of a destabilizing political novel written by a rebellious author living under an authoritarian regime. The work is written, published and very quickly banned by the government. Such a work might only be circulated within the country as illegal photocopied scripts. But that same novel, smuggled out by a compassionate foreigner, is concomitantly translated and published as a sleek paperback in another country. There is a gulf in the meaning embodied by these two material expressions and by the socio-cultural motivations at play in each instance.
Conclusion: Let us end on a slightly different note. Realizing some of the cul-de-sac of his proposal Mallarme began to conceive of the page as space, a white abyss that challenged the writer and which would be filled through spatial composition rather than just literary.
He positioned the letter as the basic unit for composition. literature and the page as the score of a musical composition, an approach which influenced his understanding of le Liver He wanted to scatter the structure of the quotidian book and destroy its reliance upon columns, text blocks and other standard typographical devices: Mallarme was attempting a synthesis between a philosophical vision of the book as an expansive instrument of the spirit and the capacity of its physical forms to embody thought in new visual arrangements.
Reframing this notion, we might say his idealised material expression for literature as a spatial composition on the white abyss of the page was a direct response to his material basis for literature, namely its attempt to embody pure thought. Ironically, the technology and cultural attitudes required to implement this vision were to follow his death: the definitive printed edition of UN coup de was only published in 1914 (the work was written in 1895 and first published in 1897).
To derive such a pragmatic response from Mallarme's ethereal musings might seem reductive. But my central point is that Mallarme's work, in conceiving the page as a white abyss for the performance of language as the embodiment of pure thought, challenges some of the fundamental ways in which we conceive the space of literature
A materialist analysis of Mallarme fleshes out how any thinking about what poetry - or indeed literature or language - might lead to a revision of how such language-objects are embodied and consumed. In this media and discourse-rich age, it also leads us to call into question the notion that all imaginable existence must eventually be contained in a book. After all, ‘it begins in the book’.
Displaying 1 of 1 review