In “Unfinished Business,” his 1985 Presidential Address to the Society for Textual Scholarship, Fredson Bowers proclaimed that “textual criticism, and its application to the finished product of editing … is not for sissies.” An editor, he dramatically avers, must be prepared to face “unknown terrors” to define “his” author’s principal intentions and straighten the boundaries of their authority. Contrasting this “sissy”-free editorial practice with the decentered, poststructuralist methods of Jerome McGann’s Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983), Bowers champions the concrete practices of an editorial theory that demands what he suggests is sound, rational (and, given his unfortunate rhetoric, one might say manly ) “judgment” to fix and unify textual instabilities. 1 But Bowers’s stake in clearly delineated textual boundaries mystifies the fungible qualities of texts that resist or reject fixity, and forecloses the hermeneutic possibilities that a more “sissified” editorial practice might encourage from flexible and fixed texts alike. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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