I. What are Textual Studies or Textual Scholarship? After a brief introduction to textual scholarship, have the class read some material about Textual Studies. After which discuss the readings and then lead into the next topic—authorship.
Textual scholars study many different aspects of texts that include production, editing, authorship, reading, description—and others. While there are many sub-topics with which to focus under the umbrella of “textual Studies,” the common goal in investigating texts is the desire to discover the history, origins, derivations, and variations of texts, and the processes of creating written documents.
How can one define textual studies? According to The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory,
textual studies are concerned, among other things, with the relations between texts: their multiplicity and singularity, their iterability and corruptibility, their fluidity and monumentality. Given such a wide field of investigation, questions about the status of texts are never far away from developments in literary and cultural theory. Most works of literature - thinking of literature in a broad sense - exist in different, sometimes multiple, versions, and each version may have a different text. This is true of the King James Bible, plays by Aeschylus or Shakespeare, novels by Mary Shelley, Henry James, or James Joyce, poems by Emily Dickinson or John Donne, critical essays by Paul de Man or Coleridge, or studies of evolution by Charles Darwin. Readers often consider works as embodied in a single text - usually, the one they are reading - but more often than not, this is a mistake...
A typical set of questions a student of literature might first ask about a given work will include: What does it mean? What did its author mean? How does it relate to other works? How does it relate to the time in which it was written? Is it any good? Beyond or alongside these lie more theoretical questions such as: How is its meaning produced? How is meaning produced? What is “an author”? What is the best theoretical or critical approach to use in interpreting this work? What is “good”? But given the opening statement about multiple versions, these could be supplemented - or preceded - by other questions: Is there more than one version? Why? Which version am I reading? Why? How does it relate to other versions? How is interpretation affected by the form of this edition? How did this work come into being? How was this particular edition arrived at? Is it any good? At an undergraduate level, these questions are less often raised. Answers to them, however, always reveal much about the specific work in question and more generally about literature, culture, and the vicissitudes of both. They also lead easily to theoretical concerns around creation, intention, authority, authorship, authenticity, rights, meaning, interpretation, media, history, and truth.
Attempts at answering such questions (and others) occur in the realm of “textual studies” or “textual scholarship.” These terms comprise an increasingly wide and interdisciplinary range of practices and approaches that include or are very closely related to various forms of bibliographical research, paleography, typography, textual criticism, the sociology of texts, genetic criticism, and the history of the book. It not being possible to introduce all of these here, the focus will be on the last four. For introductions to the other practices, the reader is referred to studies by Greetham (1994), Williams & Abbott (1999), Kelemen (2008), and Baker & Womack's (2000) annotated bibliography.
The textual differences between versions of a work can be accounted for in many different ways: they can be the result of intentional or unintentional acts by authors, collaborators, typists, printers, editors, censors, publishers. It has been the business of textual criticism to study these differences and, at least for much of the last century, with a particular goal in view... (Fordham, "Textual Studies")
See below for additional resources pertaining to textual studies.
a. https://libguides.luc.edu/c.php?g=855909&p=6159882
b. Article: Hume, Robert. "The Aims and Uses of 'Textual Studies" The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, JUNE 2005, Vol. 99, No. 2
(JUNE 2005), pp. 197-230. The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Bibliographical Society. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24295916
of America
c. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_scholarship
II. Authorship - Who writes texts? After discussing what the class thinks authorship is and what it means, etc., they would then read additional materials on the topic. Then discuss collaboration and authorship, and have the students perform a collaborative writing assignment.
a. Article: Ede, Lisa and Andrea A. Lunsford. "Collaborations and Concepts of Authorship" PMLA, Mar., 2001, Vol. 116, No. 2 (Mar., 2001), pp. 354-369
Modern Language Association. https://www.jstor.org/stable/463522
b. Article: Rodgers, Johannah. "Defining and Experiencing Authorships in the Composition Classroom..." Woodmansee, Martha, and Peter Jaszi.
The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.
III. Textual Variations – Who makes changes to texts and why? For the next part of the lesson, create discussion groups and have students talk about the life of a text and who they think makes changes to various texts, and why.
a. Authors
b. Editors
c. Publishers
d. Printers
e. Scholars
f. Others
IV. Getting Started – How do we find an author to study? In part 4 of the lesson, explain the process of getting started in the research process—using the authors included on this DH site as examples and explain how to begin the research process. (See the following section)
a. Searching unknown authors
b. Online sources
c. Digital Humanities websites and archives
d. Library sources
V. Researching Authors, Textual Variations, and Histories – What tools do we use? Next, introduce some of the research tools available and how to use them for original research—again, use the sample authors as examples.
a. Google Books: https://books.google.com/
b. WorldCat: https://www.worldcat.org/
c. HathiTrust: https://www.hathitrust.org/
d. LibraryHub: https://discover.libraryhub.jisc.ac.uk/
e. Ancestry.com
f. Findmypast.com
g. Findagrave.com
h. NGrams: https://books.google.com/ngrams
i. Google search
j. Historical Societies
k. Federal, state, and local archives
l. Newspapers.com
m. Local newspaper archives
VI. Research Activity – Report/Research Organizer Finally, for an ending assignment, the students would use the research methods and tools discussed throughout the lesson to choose an unknown author who has at least 2 editions of a text that could be compared for textual variations.
a. Choose an unknown author and text
b. Determine if multiple editions of text exist
VII. Lesson Extension A couple of ideas to extend the lesson if needed include expanding the research and planning and executing written and/or digital projects.
a. Expand research activities
i. Locate editions of text or work
ii. Compare textual variations
iii. Research biographical information
iv. Perform textual analyses on previously unresearched texts
b. Write summaries or papers
c. Create graphic representations
d. Create timelines
e. Create websites or wikis