Article
French
ID: <
10.3406/item.2004.1297>
·
DOI: <
10.3406/item.2004.1297>
Abstract
What insights do authorial revisions afford for the study of literature ? Text-critical approaches to interpretation that endeavour to answer this question exhaust themselves too often in formalistic pursuits. At the opposite end, there are analyses that bear in mind the new, cultural-historical orientation of literary criticism and attempt to reconstruct the socio-historical influence of production conditions under which James wrote from the materiality of the «bibliographical code» (McGann) of his texts. The variance in the «linguistic code», the semiotic aspect of the generation of texts in their specific processuality, tends however to go unobserved. The inquiry presented here attempts to link both perspectives. It preserves closeness to the text without sacrificing to that virtue the cultural-historical orientation towards the context of production. It asks how the authorial writing practice as it manifests itself in the variance of texts, and thereby lends itself to critical analysis, can be placed in a functional relation to pre-existing cultural-historical models of authorship.