The Text as Process and the Problem of Intentionality (1987) (original) (raw)

At a time in the history of scholarly editing in the twentieth century when «authorial intention» was still, under Anglo-American principles of editorial scholarship, a load-star for the realizing of critical editions, this essay set out to critique the implications of the intentional stance. It endeavoured to show that invoking intention, if valid at all for reaching editorial decisions and arriving at critically edited texts, could claim a theoretical foot-hold only in a conception of the closed and determinate text. A stance in theory recognizing and defining texts as open and indeterminate, by contrast, would needs also foreground texts as by nature processual. In the processes of realizing and modifying texts, «intentions » as expressed in variation and revision will form strings of authors’ readings of successive validity. If and when scholarly editing takes its guidance from the processual variability of texts, «authorial intention is [seen to be no longer] a metaphysical notion to be fulfilled but a textual force to be studied». How such an approach to the forming of scholarly editions might prove to support their critical function is indicated by sketches of examples from texts by Bertolt Brecht and Ezra Pound. Edd.