Author’s Roundtable: Thomas A. Bredehoft, “The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from Beowulf to Maus”
Response by Bonnie Mak
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
posted under
Bonnie Mak
,
textual transmission
,
Thomas Bredehoft
by Unit for Criticism
"The Posture of the Copy"
Written by Bonnie Mak (Library & Information Science and Medieval Studies)
I am pleased to have been invited to respond to Thomas Bredehoft’s presentation, because it offers an opportunity to think about the nature of textual transmission across a range of time periods, platforms, and genres, and to consider the question of reproduction, which has re-emerged in the last decade, owing in part to our new-found ability to make, share, and use digital representations of historical objects and texts with relative ease.
As Dr. Bredehoft points out, the Middle Ages offers us an alternative understanding of the transmission of text, one that operates outside the stemmatic ideologies of the last century. In this alternative model, the active excerpting and re-mixing of authoritative works is encouraged, and is more significantly the way in which one could demonstrate virtuosity. This creative mode of textual transmission – in which commonly-held knowledge is re-crafted and re-purposed – suggests that text itself is not necessarily a thing to be reproduced, but is instead a call to action; a site of production; a place of aesthetic experience.
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