“The ghost within the ghost in the machine”: An Interview with Jerome McGann (original) (raw)

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.