Hidden Literacies

the area of scholarly editing

In the area of scholarly editing, the struggles are over both the lenses scholarly editions offer for viewing the past and the ways those editions constitute historical actions themselves. If an author—let us say, Willa Cather—expressly specified that she did not want her letters published under any circumstances, how then could the editors of the Willa Cather Archive have justified publishing them? Despite the careful historicization that characterizes the methods of the Cather Archive, such a justification has to be summoned transhistorically: in this case, by claiming that a better understanding of the writer in her moment will lead to better appreciation of her and her work in the future. Who is to adjudicate what the needs of the present are, sufficient to such a resurrection against the will of the deceased? Or take Alan Gribben’s controversial version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, in which instances of racist terminology were replaced with less potentially offensive terms. Two editions, one more or less faithful, as it were, to the original and one modified, were published with the same press as part of that project. The debate over whether or not this was a good idea was not located only or principally in scholarly editing circles, but substantially in public conversations about the language we use in front of our children and in disagreements among education experts about secondary school classroom priorities.
 

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