Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Manuscript, book, and text in the twenty-first century
- 2 Complexity, endurance, accessibility, beauty, sophistication, and scholarship
- 3 Script act theory
- 4 An electronic infrastructure for representing script acts
- 5 Victorian fiction: shapes shaping reading
- 6 The dank cellar of electronic texts
- 7 Negotiating conflicting aims in textual scholarship
- 8 Hagiolatry, cultural engineering, monument building, and other functions of scholarly editing
- 9 The aesthetic object: “the subject of our mirth”
- 10 Ignorance in literary studies
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The dank cellar of electronic texts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Manuscript, book, and text in the twenty-first century
- 2 Complexity, endurance, accessibility, beauty, sophistication, and scholarship
- 3 Script act theory
- 4 An electronic infrastructure for representing script acts
- 5 Victorian fiction: shapes shaping reading
- 6 The dank cellar of electronic texts
- 7 Negotiating conflicting aims in textual scholarship
- 8 Hagiolatry, cultural engineering, monument building, and other functions of scholarly editing
- 9 The aesthetic object: “the subject of our mirth”
- 10 Ignorance in literary studies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
And what a congress of stinks! –
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
Theodore Roethke, “Root Cellar” (1948)I am, however, assuming competence.
Willard McCarty, “Modelling” (2003)As this chapter was being drafted, I read “Root Cellar” by Theodore Roethke about a place, “dank as a ditch,” where the remains of stored vegetables served as the foundation for a rich complex of new developments, not all of which seemed very attractive; the olfactory sensations, the “congress of stinks,” did, however, represent on-going life. In reviewing the remarkable expansion of electronic texts available on the Internet, I concluded after a two- or three-week survey that roughly one tenth of 1 percent of the available texts on the Internet were reliable for scholarly work – 99.9 percent of the texts were who knows what. The word “cellar” means storehouse. And when it comes to root cellars, the word “dank” is not necessarily pejorative. But there is something antiseptic in popular images of electronic texts, archived, as they seem to be, in a luminous box or cellar above a keyboard: they are dry, they resist handling except through some remote medium, one does not press the flesh of electronic texts, and therefore one does not leave on them an ever accumulating deposit of body oils and odors as readers do on books in a library.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Gutenberg to GoogleElectronic Representations of Literary Texts, pp. 138 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006