Seeing James Joyce's Ulysses into the Digital Age: Forty Years of Steering an Edition Through Turbulences of Scholarship and Reception

A post-doctoral fellowship from the Harkness Foundation in New York enabled me from the autumn of 1968 to early spring 1970 to learn the ropes of textual criticism and bibliography in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Anglo-American way. On its own terms, the discipline’s name was pleonastic in those days: Textual criticism was bibliography; bibliography was textual criticism. Textual criticism as a foundational discipline in the humanities had over centuries developed procedures to explore the transmissions of texts through and across documents. On the age-old assumption that transmission must inevitably disintegrate texts and produce error, different document texts were compared: they were collated. They would vary, sometimes less, sometimes more, in their readings. By patterns of error, the less disintegrative—less “corrupt”—document text was singled out to provide the basis for a given edition. In the twentieth century, bibliography brought further refinement to the identification of errors in transmission. Bibliography used to be understood as a set of techniques to explore the history of books as artifacts. It was now harnessed to analyze the typesetting and printing of text contents of books. Still predicated on the concept of error, bibliographical analysis encouraged inferences about what types of errors the printinghouse workmen were prone to make and therefore, how reliably or unreliably they could be assumed to have transmitted specific readings in a specific document text. Where changes between one document text and