Chartier (2014)

 

Chartier 2014

Preface

• Less spectacular, but perhaps more essential for our purposes, was the emergence, during the eighteenth century but with local variation, of an order of discourse founded on the individualization of writing, the originality of the literary work, and what Paul Bénichou has called le sacre de l’écrivain (the consecration of the writer). The connection between those three notions, which was decisive for the definition of literary property, reached its apex at the end of the eighteenth century with the fetishization of the autograph manuscript and an obsession with the author’s handwriting as a guarantee of the authenticity and the unity of a work dispersed in a number of publications. That new economy of the written word broke with an older order based on quite different practices: frequent collaboration between authors, reuse of content that had been used previously, familiar commonplaces, and traditional formulas, along with continual revision and continuation of works that remained open. viii
• The materiality of the book is inseparable from that of the text, if what we understand by that term is the ways in which the text is inscribed on the page, giving the work a fixed form but also mobility and instability. The “same” work is in fact not the same when it changes its language, its text, or its punctuation. Those major changes bring us back to the first readers of works: translators who interpreted them, bringing to bear on them their own lexical, aesthetic, and cultural repertories and those of their public; correctors, who established the text to prepare it for printing, dividing the copy they had received into sections, adding punctuation and establishing the written form of words; compositors or typographers, whose habits and preferences, constraints, and errors also contributed to the materiality of the text; without forgetting the copyists who produced fair copies of the author’s manuscripts and the censors who authorized the printing of the book. In certain special cases, the chain of interventions that shaped a text did not stop at the printed pages, but included readers' additions, in their own hands, to the books they owned. ix-x

PART I The Past in the Present

1 Listen to the Dead with your Eyes

• McKenzie
• An expert practitioner of the erudite techniques of the “new bibliography,” he taught us to go beyond its limits by showing that the meaning of a text, whether it was canonical or ordinary, depends on the forms that make it available to be read, that is, the different characteristics of the materiality of the written word. For printed objects, this meant the format of the book, the layout of the page, how the text was divided up, whether or not images were included, typographic conventions, and punctuation. In founding the “sociology of texts” on the study of their material forms, Don McKenzie did not ignore the intellectual or aesthetic significations of works. 12
• An expert practitioner of the erudite techniques of the “new bibliography,” he taught us to go beyond its limits by showing that the meaning of a text, whether it was canonical or ordinary, depends on the forms that make it available to be read, that is, the different characteristics of the materiality of the written word. For printed objects, this meant the format of the book, the layout of the page, how the text was divided up, whether or not images were included, typographic conventions, and punctuation. In founding the “sociology of texts” on the study of their material forms, Don McKenzie did not ignore the intellectual or aesthetic significations of works. 12
• Foucault
• In all cases, an original and indestructible relationship is supposed to exist between a work and its author. A connection of the sort is neither universal nor unmediated, however, because if all texts have indeed been written or pronounced by someone, they are not all assigned to one proper name. This notion underlies a question that Foucault posed in 1969 and took up again in The Order of Discourse, which is “What is an author?” His response, which considers the author to be one of the devices that aim at controlling the disturbing proliferation of discourses, does not, in my opinion, exhaust the heuristic force of the question. It obliges us to resist the temptation to hold as universal, implicitly and inappropriately, categories whose formulation or use have varied enormously through history. 12
• [...]
• conflicts concerning the name of the author and the paternity of texts at a time, before the establishment of literary property, in which stories belonged to everyone, the flourishing genre of commonplace books circulated examples ready for reuse, and plagiarism was not juridically considered a crime – unlike pirating editions, which was a crime and was defined as a violation of a bookseller’s privilege or “right in copy.” 13
• collaborative writing. How is there an author? 13
• The first is created by the plurality of the operations used in the publication of texts. Authors do not write books, not even their own books. Books, be they manuscript or printed, are always the result of multiple operations that suppose a broad variety of decisions, techniques, and skills. 17
• Mais uma vez o processo descrito
• in the case of books printed in the age of the “typographic ancien régime” between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, this process involved the production of a “fair copy” of the author’s manuscript by a professional scribe; the examination of that copy by the censors; the choices made by the bookseller/publisher as to the paper to be used, the format chosen, and the print run; the organization of the work of composition and printing in the printshop; the preparation of the copy by a copy-editor, then the composition of the text by the compositors; the reading of the proofs by the corrector; and, finally, the printing of copies that, in the era of the manual printing press, permitted new corrections during the printing process. What was happening here was thus not only the production of a book, but the production of the text itself in its material and graphic forms. 17
• [...]
• In the seventeenth century, treatises and memoirs devoted to the typographic art insisted on this division of tasks in which authors did not play the leading role. In 1619, Gonzalo de Ayala, who was himself a print corrector, stated that the corrector “must know grammar, spelling, etymologies, punctuation, and the disposition of accents.” In 1675, Melchor de Cabrera, a lawyer whom we have already met, stressed that the compositor must know how to “place question marks and exclamation marks and parentheses, because often the intention of the writers is made unclear if these elements, necessary and important for the intelligibility and the comprehension of what is written or printed are missing, since if one or the other is lacking, the meaning is changed, inverted, and transformed.” A few years later, Alonso Víctor de Parades stated that the corrector must “understand the intention of the Author in what he sends to the printing house, not only in order to introduce adequate punctuation, but also to see if the author has not committed negligences, so as to advise him of them.” The form and the layout of the printed text thus did not depend on the author, who delegated decisions about punctuation, accents, and spelling to those who prepared the copy or composed the pages. The basic historicity of a text came to it from negotiations between the order of discourse that governed its writing, its genre, and its status and the material conditions of its publication. 
• This was true to the point that the role of the men in the printshop often did not stop there. They were also charged with casting off the copy so that books, or at least certain books, could be composed, not according to the order of the text (which would keep the composed characters in place too long and leave the workers with nothing to do), but by formes – that is, by setting type for all the pages that were to be assembled within the same wooden frame, or forme, in order to be printed on the same side of a sheet. 18
• Instabilities: 
• ^ first tension or instability. Author v. printer
• mobility of meaning 19
• variations in the meaning of literary works to changes in ways of reading [...] a single book is inexhaustible. The book is not a closed entity: it is a relation; it is a center of innumerable relations. 20
• imposing control by authority 20
• Principles of analysis[
• construction of the meaning of texts between transgressed constraints and curbed liberties. The material forms of the written word or the cultural competences of readers will always mark the limits of comprehension. But appropriation is always creative, the production of a difference, the proposition of a meaning that may be unexpected. 22-3
• understand how the particular and inventive appropriations of readers, auditors, or spectators depend on a combination of the effects of meanings aimed at by the texts, uses, significations imposed by the forms of their publication, and the competences and expectations that govern the relation of each interpretive community with written culture. 23
• “‘transitive’ dimension or transparency of the statement [énoncé] [in which] every representation represents something; and a ‘reflexive’ dimension or enunciative opacity [in which] all representation presents itself representing something.” 23
• synchronic and diachronic axis 24

2 History: reading time

• There is only a narrow space between rejecting world history, understood as a modern figure of the old universal history,43 and rejecting a purely morphological comparative history.44 What is important is the choice of an investigative framework capable of rendering visible the “connected histories” that have established relationships between populations, cultures, economies, and powers.45 39
• Breaking up spatial enclaves, a move made possible in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by discoveries, exchanges, and conquests, authorized for the first time comparison between the knowledge inherent in different cultures on a planetary scale – and not only on the part of Europeans.49 Contemporaries’ awareness of a global scale leads to a similar awareness, in their own fashion, on the part of their historians. That is why the practices possible in global history focus on exchanges between worlds far distant from one another,50 or recognize in extremely local situations the interdependence that links them to distant ones, even when the persons involved do not necessarily have a clear perception of those connections. The tight union of the global and the local has led some historians to propose the idea of the “glocal,” a term that designates with more accuracy than elegance the processes by which shared references, imposed models, texts, and goods circulating on a planetary scale are appropriated to create meaning in a specific time and place. 40

PART II What is a book?

5 The author's hand

• Genetic criticism
• following the creative process that leads to the printed text and leaves multiple records: outlines and sketches of the work, notes and documents, series of drafts, corrected proofs. Such a critical approach presupposes that traces of the different stages of the creative process were kept – generally by the author himself. 74
• No século XIV
• This manuscript illustrates Petrarch’s attempts to reform the system of book production and guarantee the author’s control over his works by protecting them against what he perceived to be the faulty copying of professional scribes. Thus with the multiplication of autograph manuscripts, a more direct and authentic relation could be instituted between the author and his readers because, as Petrucci indicates, “a perfect textuality, a direct emanation from the author validated by his autograph writing, was (and forever remained) a guarantee of absolute readability for the reader.” 77
• No XVIII
• Ideas are universal by nature, purpose, and use, hence no personal appropriation of ideas can be justified. Literary property is legitimate only because each person has his own thought processes, his own way of forming concepts and connecting them. . . . Now, since pure ideas without sensible images cannot be thought, even less are they capable of presentation to others. Hence each writer must give his thoughts a certain form, and he can give them no other form than his own, because he has no other. . . . No one can appropriate his thoughts without thereby altering their form. This latter remains for ever his exclusive property. 80
• The textual form, always irreducibly singular, was the sole but powerful justification for individual appropriation of the common ideas conveyed to others by printed books. Thus, paradoxically, in order to conceptualize texts as individual property, they had to be divorced conceptually from any particular material embodiment and located in the author’s mind – or hand. Indeed, the nearest that one could come to a material form of an immaterial work was the trace left by the author’s hand. The autograph manuscript thus became the outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible genius of the writer for all those who were not able to visit or to meet him. 81 [...] Genuine handwriting had become the material embodiment of the immaterial spirit of the author. 82
• Mais uma vez, o processo
• Whereas authorial manuscripts, for example their letters, generally show very few punctuation marks and a great irregularity in spelling, the scribal “originals” (which of course were not at all original) provided a necessary legibility to the text intended for the censors and the compositors. 78
• Once the scribal copy of the autograph manuscript entered the printshop, it was further prepared by the corrector, who added accents, capital letters, punctuation, and casting-off marks so the sheets could be set into type in forms and not seriatim. Thus prepared and corrected, the manuscript copy was composed and printed. After these textual interventions made by the copyist, the censor, the copyeditor, and the compositors, the autograph manuscript lost all importance. Moreover, after the printing of the text, the printer’s copy shared the same fate and was generally destroyed or recycled. This is why only a limited number of the copies used in the printshops have survived 79
• What is an author foucault
• In his famous lecture, “What Is an Author?,” delivered in 1968, Foucault stated that, far from being relevant to all texts or genres in all ages, assigning a work to a proper name is neither universal nor constant: “The author function is . . . characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.” The attribution of a proper name to a discourse was for Foucault the result of “specific and complex operations” that put the unity and coherence of a work (or a set of works) into relation with the identity of a constructed subject. These operations rely on a dual process of selection and exclusion. First, the discourses assignable to the author-function – the “oeuvre” – must be separated from the “millions of traces left by someone after his death.” Second, the elements pertinent to the definition of the author’s position must be picked out from among the innumerable events that constitute the life of any individual.30 What is transformed in these two operations when literary archives exist and when they do not? 83
• When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche’s work, for example, where should one stop? 83
• Eds
• Modern literary archives that permit such manipulations are not without retroactive effects on the editorial practices devoted to works printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the one hand, they have inspired a quest for identifying the kind of manuscript used for the publication of printed texts. Paradoxically perhaps, the material and analytical bibliography rigorously describes and analyzes the different states (editions, issues, copies) in which a given work appeared in the hope of establishing an ideal copy text purged of the alterations inflicted on it by the process of publication and representing the text as it was written, dictated, or imagined by its author. In a discipline almost exclusively devoted to the comparison of printed texts, this led to an obsession with lost manuscripts and a radical distinction between the “essentials” of a work, located in its absent autograph manuscript, and the scribal or typographic “accidentals” that have distorted or corrupted it. / On the other hand, the unstable delimitation of the work introduced by the richness of literary archives inspired editorial decisions for authors who did not leave any autograph documents. 84
• desire to edit an author’s works according to the chronology > literary biographies 85
• conclusão
• A “radical incompatibility,” to use Margreta de Grazia’s expression, thus exists between the romantic or pre-romantic aesthetic of the work, written, as Diderot said, by the heart of its author and readable in his or her genuine hand, and a previous regime of textual production that did not consider that “literature” (a category that did not even exist in its modern sense) must necessarily be assigned to individual singularity. [...] by keeping such an incompatibility in mind that we must understand the effects produced on editorial practices, textual studies, and reading habits by the existence of literary archives and, more fundamentally, the conceptual mutations that, from the eighteenth century on, made them possible, desirable, and necessary. 86

7 Translation

• Translating "is like seeing Flemish tapestries from behind" 100
• Few are the exceptions that raise a translation to the dignity of the original. 100
• On the other hand, equanting translation and transcription makes translation seem a form of the professionalization of writing that might assure translators solid revenues 100
• It was at the cost of a labor of censorship and adaptation that amputated the translation of blasphemous statements, ecclesiastical characters, and overly strong sexual allusions that Quevedo’s Buscón could delight French readers in both cities and villages until the end of the eighteenth century 104
• Translation, in fact, always implies a unique appropriation of texts. There are several reasons for this. First, there is the personality of the translator, for whom translation was often an entry into a career in letters. For some, translation was simply a professional activity; for others, it was a task that they were assigned but that could also become a literary act. 105
• Trad
• “translation is a vile thing, and translation, in those who profess it, presupposes a lowness of courage and a debasement of the mind.” In 1620, he was even more emphatic: “Imagine that for an ambitious mind, it is a cruel blow to kill oneself for a thing that is neither esteemed nor estimable, of which not only one would not dare boast, but would hold it offensive if others praised it.” Still, a translation was a gift worthy of its dedicatees because it offered an opportunity to read a work of unequaled worth [...] A similar ambivalence governed the very practice of translation, which was supposed to combine a demand for fidelity and a need for liberty. 106
• By completely rewriting the end of the novel, Scarron makes it conform to a system of conventions, not present in the Castilian original, that requires a happy ending and an exemplary morality. / The presence of Spanish literature throughout Europe, and especially in France, was accompanied by the idea of the perfection of the Castilian language and the exact correspondence between how it was written and how it was pronounced. In the age of Don Quixote, Spanish was a language that was known, read, and spoken by the elites and by lettered Europeans.

PART III Texts and Meanings

9 Paratext and Preliminaries

• Genette
• Genette defines the paratext as a “vestibule,” a “fringe,” or a “zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public . . . that . . . is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it.” He goes on to remark: “The ways and means of the paratext change continually, depending on period, culture, genre, author, work, and edition, with varying degrees of pressure, sometimes widely varying.”1 Continuing his taxonomy, he distinguishes two classes of paratextual elements: the peritext, which we find within the book itself (title, epigraph, preface, author’s foreword, preliminary remarks, notes, illustrations, etc.); and the epitext, which is situated outside of the book itself (correspondence, diaries and journals, interviews, etc.). Each one of these elements has its own history, but tracing that history is not the purpose of Genette’s book: “We are dealing here with a synchronic and not a diachronic study – an attempt at a general picture, not a history of the paratext.” 135
• Sobre textos preliminares
• Another characteristic of typographical practice in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries was to impose a unity on texts in the preliminary materials with a quite different origin, status, and function. The result was several intertwined relationships. The first, obviously, was the one that the author established with his protectors or his readers thanks to the dedication and the prologue. But beyond that relationship, which has garnered the most paratextual attention, there were other relationships embedded in the preliminary materials: the one between the monarch and the author to whom he grants a privilege; the one between the censors and the authorities who have charged them with examining the work; the ones between the king, his council, or his ministers and all those (booksellers, judges, officials) who were expected to respect and apply the regulations governing the book trade. In this sense, the preliminary materials in an old book state and articulate a complex set of relations with power that goes well beyond the strategy “of an influence on the public, an influence that – well or poorly understood and achieved – is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it.” 138
• [...]
• The title page communicates more – in fact, much more – than the title itself, to which the translations reduce it. For one thing, as I have attempted to show elsewhere,16 the visual space of the title page shows the three things that commanded all literary practice in the Golden Age: a claim to a paternity of the text that the prologue, and then the fiction of Cide Hamete Benengeli, ironically deny; the patronage relationship linking the writer to the duke of Béjar, whose various titles occupy four lines of type; the economic realities of the edition that implied the royal authorization [Con privilegio], the work of the printshop (represented on the title page by Juan de la Cuesta’s imposing device) and the enterprise of the bookseller/publisher who had financed the edition and sold the copies (“Vendese en casa de Francisco de Robles, librero del Rey nuestro Señor”). 139
• Preliminary materials also became a small stage for literary controversies in which political machinations were played out (as they also were in the war of lampoons). 145
• Conclusão
• What lessons can we draw from having accompanied Don Quixote and his double along their road? The most fundamental one, it seems to me, is a need to situate all the peritextual materials within the multiple relations that bind them together. If we want to understand the preliminaries, those relations count more than whether each piece, taken separately, belongs to one paratextual genre or another. Those relations, which form a system,34 are of several sorts. Within any one book, they are organized on the basis of the relationship among different registers of texts that seem totally heterogeneous (to the point that many modern editions retain only the most immediately authorial or literary portions). Still, strong links exist among the pieces connected with the process of publication and those that are addressed to the reader, whoever he may be. This means that we need to restore the multiple logics that determined how a collection of texts of highly different natures – juridical, administrative, encomiastic, performative, biographical, and more – would be gathered together. [...] The interpretation of each paratext, or each element of each of the paratexts, is closely dependent on all the others. 148

10 Publishing Cervantes

• Authors do not “write” books, not even their own books. Always, however, their readers have been tempted to leaf through the printed pages in order to encounter the work as the writer composed it, desired it, and dreamed of it. [...]  a text goes through many operations to become a book. 150
  
• O processo, de novo
• Before the original became copy to be used for typographic composition, further preparation increased the distance between the autograph manuscript and the text as it was offered to readers. All seventeenth-century treatises on the art of printing – held to be one of the liberal arts, not a mechanical one, and even the art of all arts – insist on the decisive role of correctors and compositors. The forms and dispositions of the printed text (spellings, accents, punctuation) did not depend on the author, who delegated to whoever prepared the copy or those who set the type all decisions regarding such matters. Another part of the printshop workers’ role was to divide the original in such a way that the book could be composed, not according to the order of the text, which would require the use of too many characters for too long a time and use the workers’ time inefficiently, but rather by formes – that is, composing at one time all the pages to be printed on the same side of a print sheet. 151
• Myth of the first edition
• This forcefully impugns the myth of the first edition, which certain editors of the work have claimed offers the text exactly as its author confided it to the pages of his manuscript. This erroneous certitude has led to enormous extravagances. At the end of the nineteenth century, the advent of photographic techniques fed the fetishism of the facsimile that, by offering an identical reproduction of the first edition, gave the illusion of returning to the authentic original text. At the end of the twentieth century, when the obsessive theme of the infinite polysemy of texts invaded literary criticism, it led to interpreting every anomaly as the expression of a subtle intention, a voluntary error, or a note of parody intended by the author. Only a profound ignorance of the practices of early publishing could have made anyone think that Cervantes could have ignored the limitations that the state of the language and the common experience of his age imposed on the composition of his book or that he could have freed himself from the legal and technical constraints imposed on publication. His text was subjected, like all other texts (and perhaps more than others, thanks to the haste of his publisher, Francisco de Robles, to get the book off the presses before the Christmas holidays of the year 1604) to the habits of the copyists, the mistakes of the compositors, and the preferences of the correctors. No old edition, and the first edition even less than another – not even the original, if it had been conserved – can place the reader face to face with the text that Cervantes’s pen traced in the notebooks and sheets of paper that, as the years went by, made up a manuscript that was undoubtedly quite disparate and very thick. 152
• Task of editor in the XIV
• For him, every modern editor has a double task: he is responsible for mobilizing all the fields of expertise (philological, bibliographical, historical) that help to relate the composition and the publication of a text to their conditions of possibility, thus avoiding factual anachronisms and interpretive fantasies. On the other hand, he must propose a text that respects what can be known of the author’s desires and that is readable for a contemporary reader who is neither a philologist nor a bibliographer. 155
• Ideal copy text
• trace the entire manuscript tradition of a work so as to establish the most probable text8 in the aim of reconstructing an original text supposed to exist beyond or above its multiple material forms and that is, according to the vocabulary of analytical bibliography, the “ideal copy text.” A rigorous study of the various states of a given work (editions, issues, copies) is mobilized with the aim of returning to a text purified of alterations inflicted on it by the publishing process and in conformity with the text redacted, dictated or desired by its author.9 Hence the radical distinction between the work in its essence and the accidents that have deformed or corrupted it. 
• In a different perspective – for example, that of Shakespeare criticism – even when they are strange, the forms in which a work has been published must be considered as different historical incarnations.10 All states of the text, even the most inconsistent and bizarre, must be included and eventually published because, as the result of acts of writing and as printshop practices, they constitute the work as it was transmitted to its readers. Editing a work is not a matter of rediscovering an ideal text, but rather of showing explicitly the preference given to one or another of its states along with the choices made for its presentation in such matters as divisions, punctuation, written forms, and spelling. 156

11 Publishing Shakespeare

• Mckenzie
• “Do texts exist independently of the medium in which they appear, its material forms accidental and merely vehicular; or do they exist only in those forms, each a unique textual incarnation whose materiality itself crucially shapes meaning, altering in some way the significance of the linguistic organization of the work?”7 The answer – adopted by an entire branch of Shakespearean criticism – is to hold each state of the text to be one of the “incarnations” of the work itself, without being able to separate (to borrow the language of the New Bibliography) the essence from the accidents. That position is faithful to the definition of the “sociology of texts” proposed by D. F. McKenzie, understood as “the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception.”8 As is known, that proposition prompted suspicious or hostile reactions on the part of the more orthodox supporters of the bibliographic tradition [...] That approach, and the many erudite studies that subscribed to it, supposed a radical distinction between accidental variations that resulted from operations within the printshops and corrupted the meaning of the text and the work as it had been written, dictated and desired by its author. 159
• By insisting on the role that material forms play in the process of the construction of meaning, D. F. McKenzie rejected the opposition between “substantives” and “accidentals” and between the text in its essence and the alterations inflicted on it by the preferences, habits or errors of the men who set it in type and corrected the composed pages. Thus he opened the way for all the studies that, in recent years, have focused on the plural states of the “same” work that can be discerned in its different editions or even in different copies from the same edition and on the multiple meanings that such an instability assigned to the work. [...] holding each state of a work as one of its historical incarnations that must be understood, respected and, if possible, published. For McKenzie, the concept of an “ideal copy text” that exists above and beyond the various printed forms of a work is an illusion that textual criticism must abandon in favor of an analysis of the effects produced on the text, on its readers and, eventually, on its author by each example of the material existence of that text. 160
• Right of copy
• We should keep in mind that the legal requirements for publishing books were defined by the regulations of the Stationers’ Company, which recognized a patrimonial and perpetual “right in copy” granted to the bookseller or the printer who had acquired a manuscript and registered it with the Company. In this system, the only illegal act that could be brought before justice was to publish, without a prior agreement, a title that another printer had “entered” into the registers of the Company. In contrast, publishing a text without the permission of its author on the basis of an unreliable manuscript was not a crime. The only recourse for authors who thought themselves betrayed by the publication and circulation of corrupt versions of their works was to prepare the publication of a new edition. 161
• Already in this first publishing venture, there is a discernible tension between the demand for an ideal text in perfect conformity with what the author had conceived and written and the variations introduced by the material nature of the printed book. Those variations occurred on different levels. 167 [...] Finally, an extreme diversity in spellings, punctuation, and the distribution of the text resulted from the differing habits of the various compositors 168
• editors who thought themselves more Shakespearean than Shakespeare [more darwinian than darwin] 169
  

12 The time of the work

• “the time of the work” because we can discern in this unique object different states of the text and successive forms of its performance. 172
• Those changes underline the gap – political, religious, and aesthetic – between Elizabethan times and those of the Restoration 173
• Conclusão
• the “publication” of a play always implies the involvement of a number of people, places, and operations that made it possible for a text to circulate between composition and revision, representation and the printing process, the theatrical troupe and the typographic workshop. It is in this sense that works should be understood as collective productions and as the result of “negotiations,” which consist not only in the acquisition of objects for the stage, the appropriation of languages, or the symbolic reuse of social and ritual practices,20 but are also, and fundamentally, “transactions” that are always unstable and always renewed, between the work in its perpetuated identity and the various forms of its transmission and its representations.21 
• A second lesson concerns the temporality of the works. There are several ways to reconstruct a text: by following the genesis of the text itself in its successive states; by focusing on the history of its receptions and interpretations; or by analyzing the changes in the modalities of its publication. These approaches are based on different disciplines (genetic criticism, the sociology of reception, bibliography), but they all suppose a comparison between states of the text (or its appropriations) separated by spans of time of varying length. 179-80