Studying Textual Studies:Problems and AgendasModiano, Raimonda, Leroy F.Searle, andPeter Shillingsburg, eds.Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies

Abstract

VOICE. TEXT. HYPERTEXT. EACH TERM REPRESENTS A DISTINCT "moment" in the development of textuality, from orality to literacy to digitization. But each is also the scene of considerable dispute, a point not at all lost on the editors and contributors of the volume under review. How distinct are these "moments"? How momentous? What threads of human consciousness connect them? What technologies advance them? For that matter, in what ways are this book's featured transmission technologiesspeech, inscription, print, pixel-at all relevant to the phenomenon of textuality? The subtitle's focus on the "practices" of textual study indicate problems articulated for some future disciplinary agenda. How might we study these transitional, evolutionary textual phenomena, edit them for critics and students, and bring them and textual criticism to center stage in current critical thinking and pedagogy? Voice, Text, Hypertext is at times ungainly, but a gamesome and thoroughly engrossing field book that should inspire cosmopolitan research, critical editing, and interpretation. Of the three organizing principles, the least accessible and hence most compelling is Voice. The age of the voiced text was an age of memory, performance, and textual evolution. Authority resided not so much in the text as in its singer, an individual of demonstrable memory, spiritual depth, and theatrical skill. What must it have been like when singers developed written aids to prompt their memory; or when full performances were first transcribed; or when transcriptions simply replaced singing: when agency was transferred from singer to writer, and authority was lodged, indeed sacralized, in words not sung but written? Reflecting on these imagined moments of transition deepens our appreciation of both the substance and insubstantiality of textuality. Despite the efforts of Walter J. Ong and others, the