Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Manuscript, book, and text in the twenty-first century
- 2 Complexity, endurance, accessibility, beauty, sophistication, and scholarship
- 3 Script act theory
- 4 An electronic infrastructure for representing script acts
- 5 Victorian fiction: shapes shaping reading
- 6 The dank cellar of electronic texts
- 7 Negotiating conflicting aims in textual scholarship
- 8 Hagiolatry, cultural engineering, monument building, and other functions of scholarly editing
- 9 The aesthetic object: “the subject of our mirth”
- 10 Ignorance in literary studies
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Ignorance in literary studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Manuscript, book, and text in the twenty-first century
- 2 Complexity, endurance, accessibility, beauty, sophistication, and scholarship
- 3 Script act theory
- 4 An electronic infrastructure for representing script acts
- 5 Victorian fiction: shapes shaping reading
- 6 The dank cellar of electronic texts
- 7 Negotiating conflicting aims in textual scholarship
- 8 Hagiolatry, cultural engineering, monument building, and other functions of scholarly editing
- 9 The aesthetic object: “the subject of our mirth”
- 10 Ignorance in literary studies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Ignorance in other men may be censured as idleness, in an academick it must be abhorred as treachery.
Samuel Johnson, “On the Character and Duty of an Academic” (ms first published in 1995)The truth is that all forms and states of knowledge, including factual and documentary knowledge, are mediated in precise and determinate ways … Scholarship is interpretation, whether it is carried out as a bibliocritical discourse or a literary exegesis.
Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (1991)[I]t's clear that what I know is two parts of bugger-all. All that I don't know, on the other hand, is truly impressive & the library of Alexandria would be too small to contain the details of all my ignorance.
Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish (2001)The title of this chapter was first suggested in jest. How it survived the initial level of levity I am not sure. I recall, however, the circumstances that caused me to suggest it. The first was the conference, already referred to in chapter one, where a technology expert responded to my question about how accuracy would be preserved when putting on a hard disk the contents of all the libraries of the world by saying simply: We all have to learn to put up with noise. Although as scholarly editor I objected, my concerns may have been unrealistic. The future has arrived and is noisy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Gutenberg to GoogleElectronic Representations of Literary Texts, pp. 189 - 199Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006