On McGann's "philological conscience" (original) (raw)

“The ghost within the ghost in the machine”: An Interview with Jerome McGann

CO-AUTHOR Manuel Portela (UC) Almost three decades ago, Jerome McGann stated that if the Humanities were facing a crisis, it did not concern propositions on literary artifacts but our scholarly practices (1988). Attentive to these, he helped to bring them to the forefront of discussion in both textual scholarship and literary criticism. This work was not solely theoretical, but it was solidly built upon his long-time experience, first, as print editor of Byron’s works (1980-1993), and, later, as hypermedia editor of the Rossetti Archive (1993–2008; http://www.rossettiarchive.org/). Equally important for the development of his thought have been his teaching career as John Stewart Bryan Professor at the University of Virginia (1986–), and his many institutional appointments. Changes brought about by digital textuality upon the modes of production and circulation of both literary works and scholarly discourses led him to publish one of the most seminal essays for rethinking the technologies and forms of the book in hypermedia environments (“The Rationale of Hypertext”, written in 1995). Distinguished scholar and critic, McGann soon became widely acknowledged for his interventions on the Digital Humanitiesdebates, for which his fifteen-year old Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (2001) is a sort of “classic”. He has recently published A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (2014), gathering essays that follow from his pioneering book on the matter. From Blake to Byron, from Dickinson to Drucker, from social text to online scholarship, his groundbreaking combination of philological investigation and philosophical provocation has resulted in textual artifacts and conceptual models that continue to resonate as we plunge deeper and deeper into the regime of computation. McGann’s editorial and theoretical work on the social and bibliographic dimensions of textual events has been at the core of the Materialities of Literature PhD Program at the University of Coimbra. Focusing mostly on McGann’s recent work, our interview addresses the reasons underlying his critical moves, and looks at his scholarly poetics of interpretation as a material engagement with imaginative works. \\\ Centrando-se em obras recentes de McGann, esta entrevista aborda as razões subjacentes à sua perspetiva crítica, e analisa a sua poética da interpretação como uma interrogação material das criações da imaginação.

TOWARDS PHILOLOGY IN A NEW KEY: A Conversation with Jerome McGann

No scholar has done more than Jerome McGann to expand our understanding of the nature of print and digital media. His experience as an editor of print media during the 70s and the 80s resulted in a drive to rehistoricize editorial practice that has revolutionized textual scholarship. From this perspective, he began, in the early 90s, to survey a digital future that would involve the colossal task of reconstructing the entirety of our cultural inheritance for display on digital networks. For McGann, the transition from print to digital media is less a revolution than it is a convergence, and the question we face is not so much how we get on with the future, but "What kind of research and educational program can integrate the preservation and study of these two radically different media?"In a new book to be titled Philology in a New Key,

John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal

The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 2004

His first book was a comparative study of twentieth-century Irish and French novelists, Crosscurrents and Confluences: Echoes of Religion in 20 th Century Fiction (2000), and he was the recipient of the translation bursary, the Prix de l'Ambassade, for his translation of the memoir of the French novelist, Jean Sulivan, Anticipate Every Goodbye (2000). More recently he co-edited, with Michael Böss, the proceedings of the 2001 EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies) conference, Engaging Modernity: Readings of Irish Politics, Literature and Culture at the Turn of the Century (2003). He is currently working on a second book on John McGahern for a US publisher entitled The Life and Works of John McGahern as well as co-editing with Dr Grace Neville the proceedings of a Franco-Irish conference held in IT Tallaght in March 2003, France and Ireland: Anatomy of a Relationship (Peter Lang). He has published widely on various aspects of the twentieth-century Irish and French novel in journals in Ireland, Great Britain and France. I wish to thank my father, Liam, for his painstaking reading of the manuscript and his invaluable editorial advice. The Institute of Technology, Tallaght awarded me a generous grant from its Seed Fund to help me to devote time to writing this book. The library staff there also gave me much support in acquiring the books and articles that I needed. Eugene O'Brien, the editor of this series, provided me with the opportunity of being part of a great initiative and is a friend and editor whose judgement I trust completely. Brian Langan of the Liffey Press also offered vital suggestions that have improved the overall quality of the book. John McGahern is unspoilt by his success and standing in the literary world and has shown me much kindness and openness in the past few years. I am especially indebted to him for the interview which appears at the end of this study. Declan Kiberd supplied me with encouragement when I was at the early stages of writing this book and also did an informative and insightful interview with me on the work of John McGahern. My wife and children are all hugely supportive of my literary endeavours and the book is rightfully dedicated to them.

The Art of Memory in the Work of John McGahern

Through the exploration of some influential theories on memory and of some recent critical perspectives on McGahern’s work, this paper will focus on the crucial role played for this writer by memory, history and imagination, both as themes and as creative strategies.

The Scholar's Art: Literary Studies in a Managed World

The Modern Language Review, 2007

In the last decade, he has explored hypertext as a viable "new" scholarly apparatus, primarily using the Rossetti Hypermedia Archive as the foundation for facilitating a collaborative scholarly community. The resulting Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) has already begun the work of amassing hypertextual projects and creating a peer-review system. With The Scholar's Art, McGann returns to conversations begun in The Romantic Ideology and The Poetics of Sensibility, but these conversations also incorporate his theories on reorganizing scholarly models very similar to the hyperspace community proposed with NINES. The title suggests that this work will be another lamentation on the corporatization of Humanities education. Instead, this series of chapters, loosely grouped under thematic section titles, sets off on a self-proclaimed dramatic monologue specifically aimed at scholars-with no apologies for excluding the "passive consumers of Survivor, Grand Theft Auto or Left Behind" (xi). McGann uses poetry to highlight that literary scholarship is not self-important but is intrinsically really important. As with much recent writing about the revision of Humanities, McGann ministers that to break free of the stereotypes against scholarship and poetic language, we must engage at a distance as well as disengage with the rhetoric that we have created. The scholar, for Jerome McGann, is an artist-not an observer of art, but a participant in the continual creation of knowledge. Using his foundational work on Romantic poetry and textual studies, McGann encourages us to cease the defense of poetry as the language of an elite and to recuperate it as part of a scholarly artistry: Every scholar's art ceases with the presumption of knowledge, when method itself has become an archaeology of knowledge. For the

Memory, Image and Reading Traces of the Infinite: Gerald Murnane’s A History of Books

'Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One', Sydney University Press, pp. 127-142, 2020

This chapter considers the relation among image, memory and reading traces in Gerald Murnane’s 2012 novella, A History of Books to make an argument about narrative thinking in the specular mode. Murnane frames the text as a potentially infinite series, comprising mnemonic traces of reading books in a subject’s lifetime. How does literature think through images? How are these images situated in memory? Contra Alain Badiou, for whom, literary thinking constructs a finite structure from the natural order of infinity, I will demonstrate how Murnane’s specular narrative thinking formalizes an infinite associative chain of images. Memory-images of books underwrite a view of reading as plastic memory-traces. It has an interesting equation with the editorial model of consciousness in the cognitive philosophy of Daniel Dennett. Connecting Murnane’s image-thought-memory complex with Mallarmé’s dialectic of a finite book and the infinite Book, I would spell out Murnane’s narrative texture as the serialized deployment of a potential and impossible infinity.

Moral Theology and the Historian's Conscience: Is There a License to Besmirch?

This article examines how Catholic moral theologians analyzed the constraints imposed by the rights of the dead to their good name on historical writing and research. The concern of Catholic moral theologians for persons’ rights to their good name coupled with their concern for the rights of dead persons placed serious moral constrains on the work of historians. At the same time, from very early on, these moral theologians showed appreciation of the benefits of historical writing, including writing on the less public aspects of historical figures. The general tendency was to allow to historians some greater moral elbow room. There was, however, a clear red line: what was and had been always secret could not be revealed, regardless of the benefits. By the end of the nineteenth century the authors of the casuist manualists revised the traditional doctrine and removed the moral red line that was accepted up to then. Historians could now reveal what had always been secret. This doctrinal development resulted from two historical events. On the one hand the opening of the Vatican Archives and the need to give to propagandists and journalists within politically organized Catholic conservatism to fight as equals in the printed media.