PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Arden I and Transitions in Shakespeare
Introduction
- Walter Ong’s conception of fixity of meaning
- Pierre Bordieu’s theory of production of cultural legitimacy through restricted fields.
“The printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form.”
(Ong, 1982, pp.130)
“The reader must fictionalize the writer. For a text to convey its message, it does not matter whether the author is dead or alive. Most books extant today were written by persons now dead.” (Ong, 1982, pp.100)
“..........an attempt is made to exhibit the variations from the editor’s text, which are found in the primary sources, the Quarto of 1604 and the Folios of 1623, in so far as those variations are of importance for the ascertainment of the text.”
Hart (1905), as quoted by Kernan (2015)
“.....finalized, had reached a state of completion, that the print enclosed thought in thousands of copies of a work of exactly the same visual and physical consistency.”
(Ong,1982, pp. 129-130)
“Within a single universe one always finds the entire range of intermediaries between works produced with reference to the restricted market on the one hand, and works determined by an intuitive representation of the expectations of the widest possible public on the other.”
(Bordieu, 1984, pp.19)
Field of large-scale production vs. field of restricted production
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“The opposition between legitimate and illegitimate…expresses the different social and cultural valuation of two modes of production: the one a field that is its own market, allied with an educational system which legitimizes it; the other a field of production organized as a function of external demand, normally seen as socially and culturally inferior” (Bordieu, pp.22)
Sources
- Bordieu, P. (1984) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. NY: Columbia University Press.
- Finkelstein, D. and McCleery, A. (2005) An Introduction to Book History. London and NY: Routledge.
Sources
- Kernan, M.A., (2015, draft) The Launch of the First Series of the Arden Shakespeare, 1899: An Early Case Study of Academic Publishing for the Humanities.
- Ong, W.J., Hartley, J., (1982, 2002) Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word. London and NY: Routledge.