0.8 Response to gregory nagy, homer multitext project

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The future-directed Homer Multitext project of Gregory Nagy and his team is to be shaped to model “dynamic...collaboration in research and teaching at all levels of education.” The project's future has already begun; and, as a project, it is vitally founded on, and rooted in, the powers of the team, since without highly qualified and highly motivated team cooperation such projects would simply be inconceivable from whence we stand today, endeavoring to discern the shape of things to come. The Homer Multitext shaping and modelling will rely on realising a complex digital environment. Given such an environment—which is anything but a given as yet—the project, at its core, strives to body forth, in digital virtuality, that type of product of humanities' scholarship we used to term the “scholarly edition.” Yet so distinct from the “scholarly edition” of venerable lineage will be the product that it should serve the purposes of our meeting well to analyze the difference. Essential aspects thereof show up on multiple levels of theory, of methodology, of substance, of design, or of user appeal and involvement. Only some of these I shall endeavour to pinpoint—nor indeed could my response be all-comprising, since I am far from being a scholar of Ancient Greek, or of Homer; and have at most a nodding acquaintance with principles of textual scholarship in classical philology.

These principles, as we find them reflected and at times forcefully questioned in Gregory Nagy's paper, are already fruitfully there put in perspective, both from out of the Homeric materials themselves and the traditions of their transmission, and on grounds of (for example) the orality scholarship that he so effectively adduces. They may also, in the given case, be illuminated through modern textual scholarship as it has advanced against the background of theories of text and of literature in several branches of textual and editorial scholarship through to the end of the twentieth century, and until today.

Why textual criticism and scholarly editing? The be-all and end-all of these twin disciplines in lay as well as academic common opinion lies foremost in getting “the text” “right.” It is a standard not merely of scholarship, but a demand in our culture that transmissions be free, and be freed, from error. Textual criticism and scholarly editing are, in other words, or have in our awareness hitherto been, predicated on error. For gains—we assume—this has brought about reliable texts, or more reliable texts than provided by any one given individual document involved in carrying a given transmission. What, in reverse, the losses have been, has never, to my knowledge, been systematically considered.

Gradually, though, we are beginning to discern contours on the dark side of this moon of transmissions under which we live. We are becoming aware of the variability and dynamics of texts and of the autonomous vitality of textual traditions; though at the same time, admittedly, we feel challenged and disoriented by the multiplicity of factors assumedly shaping texts and textual traditions as freshly perceived. Most seriously vitiating against embracing fresh orientations has been that these, questioning traditional methods and rules for establishing critical texts as they do, thereby also unbalance pivotal key concepts: “text” as well as “author” and indeed authorship itself.