COMMERCIAL EDS & CRITICAL EDS

[Daud R. Ali]

Producing critical editions is indeed an important task, and many 
historical and Indological scholarship has unquestionably rested on the 
foundation of critically edited texts.  

But Mr. Lopez is correct in observing that the production of critical 
editions is not a highly favored project in the american academy today.  
This is only in part, I think, due to the 'religious studies" nature of 
the job market.   If my eyes have not deceived me, once source of the 
reticence in allied fields concerning the agendas of classical philology 
is, I think,  a now widely established critique of the epistemological 
foundations of philology, its notions of textuality and language.  For 
this reason a whole host of types of textual study are no longer accepted 
as importnat ideological work.  I remember as an undergraduate coming 
across a concordance of Ulysses by James Joyce that was published from a 
dissertation.  Such a task I think would be unthinkable now in English 
lit, not simply because any computer program could make short work of 
such a task, but because concerns over the "text as such" is no longer a 
critical language in literature depts.  I do not mean to compare 
establishing a critical edition in a precise manner with "new criticism" 
as it is called in English lit, but I do believe that there have been 
shifts in the concerns about texts as a whole which make many departments 
(especially those concerned with issues that are not precisely 
philological-- religion, history, south asian studies, etc.) reticent on 
this issue. To make this sort of scholarship relevant, will require, it 
seems to me facing up to these well known developments in textual and 
linguistic theory.

Daud Ali