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The Progress of Error: or, the Recursive Eighteenth Century Alice Boone Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 copyright 2015 by Alice Boone all rights reserved Abstract “The Progress of Error: or, the Recursive Eighteenth Century” Alice Boone Digital archives of early modern printed materials—on Early English Books Online, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg, among others—are rife with scanning errors, incomplete metadata, typos, and other odd, frustrating artifacts of mediation. Each technological change in writing brings its own version of problems in preserving and mediating our print history—problems which may, paradoxically, proliferate errors as they seek to correct prior mistakes. “The Progress of Error” traces a history of these fractious, recursive, debates about error correction and mediation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when editors, printers, and critics squabbled over the best means of preserving classical texts, Shakespeare, Milton, and early English ballads. I argue that the literary past is literally made of mistakes and attempts to correct them which go out of control; these errant corrections are not to be fixed in future editions but rather are constitutive of Enlightenment concepts of mediation, criticism, sensory perception, historicity, and agency. Editor and satirist Alexander Pope played both sides of the error correction and creation game, translating and editing texts at the same time as he reveled in satire’s distorting lens and its potential for correcting others’ moral and intellectual failings. Classical editor Richard Bentley, a target of Pope’s scourge in the first edition of the Dunciad, practiced extraordinary editorial hubris in insisting that he could conjecturally correct not just typos in Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, but entire lines that he felt were blots on the poem’s design and style. Lewis Theobald followed Bentley’s intellectually provocative but over-reaching, bombastic style when he turned his scrutiny onto Pope’s editorial methods: his Shakespeare Restor’d was a method composed of broken lines and phrases as he animadverted on his rival’s work. Less sharp-tongued but even more ambitious, Thomas Percy undertook a gigantic editorial vision of composing a world history of poetry in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and related editorial projects, many of which were left unfinished: a hodgepodge of misprisioned scale and poetic scope. Correction’s effects thus extended beyond fixing a particular error in a poem or play; the protocols engendered new technologies of social behavior in print and new forms of mediating agency. I am fascinated by those printer’s errors and scanning glitches, those moments when mediation goes awry. Following Marshall McLuhan, media historians Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have used the term “remediation” to consider how digital technology refashions media across forms and genres. With McLuhan’s background in early modern literary criticism in mind, I adapt the term for the study of print technology. I fold in related meanings of remediation—to remedy a mistake, to intervene in a situation, to renovate a landscape—to describe an emergence of literary effects generated by the iterative interventions of textual error correction. I pay attention to editors’ critical vocabularies of mediating conjectures, surveying prospects, and sifting through reams of information. The same debates about errors in perception and transmission of knowledge which engaged Enlightenment philosophers such as Francis Bacon, George Berkeley and John Locke took place on the margins of pages as editors debated how to use these new tools of mediation. My dissertation historicizes and breaks down these protocols and interactions into their smallest radical units—errors—with the goal of theorizing how these procedures have come to constitute both objects of study and critical practices in the field of literary study. It is a meta-reflective experiment in mediating among fields of book history, media theory, experimental poetics and digital art, and disciplinary histories to ask questions about where we may go next. Table of Contents List of Images ii Acknowledgements iii An Apology for Errors 1 Introduction: The Progress of “The Progress of Error” 2 Chapter 1: The Circular Ruins of Alexander Pope: Theorizing the Poetics of Remediation 30 Interstitial Note 103 Chapter 2: Richard Bentley’s Hazy Horizons of Editing: Theories of Mind, Mediation, and Emendation 112 Chapter 3: Prospects of Error: Textual Editing as an Unlikely Form of Menippean Discourse 182 Chapter 4: Culture is an Error: Mediating Conjectures in Thomas Percy’s Editorial Theories 230 Conclusion: Errant Paths and the Future of the Book 279 Works Cited 307 i List of Images Errata page in The Growth of Error 289 Errata page in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge 290 A reader’s annotation of Temple of Fame 291 “Flying over the Tulips Fields” 292 Glitch interpolation of Pope Alexander I 293 Glitch interpolation of Pope Alexander II 294 Perceiving pixels in the glitch interpolation of Pope Alexander I 295 Remediation and self-interpolation of Pope Alexander II 296 Mediated glitching interface 297 Mediated procedural glitching of The Distrest Poet I 298 Mediated procedural glitching of The Distrest Poet II 299 Mediated procedural glitching of The Distrest Poet III 300 A glitched view from the New Atlantis I 301 A glitched view from the New Atlantis II 302 Audacity 303 Swift’s Glitch 304 Satire on False Perspective 305 Satire of Satire on False Perspective 306 ii Acknowledgements This project has taken an errant path over many years, and I am grateful above all to Jenny Davidson, Clifford Siskin, and James Basker for helping me see it through. They will see that I refer to their great advice, provocation, and knowledge at various points in this work. Dennis Tennen and Ross Hamilton stepped in to be readers at a late stage, and I am grateful for their willingness to read my work and offer warm encouragement. Because I tested these ideas out in classrooms before I could find ways to write about them myself, I offer enormous thanks to my students at Columbia, Barnard, LaGuardia Community College, the Gallatin School of Indivdiualized Study at NYU, and Haverford College. I thank Rajeswari Mohan, Maud McInerney, Debora Sherman, Laura McGrane, and the rest of the English department at Haverford for giving me an extraordinary opportunity to teach such a wide range of classes, and the students rose to every challenge and surprised me in the best ways. Nancy Piore and Pamela Cobrin in the Barnard Writing Fellows Program and Nicole B. Wallack, and Sue Mendelsohn in the Columbia University Writing Program and Writing Center helped me find what’s important in my pedagogy; my initial interest in reframing errors came from my work with them. The biggest professional and technological lessons of my life came from my work as an undergraduate at the Columbia Daily Spectator. I have joked many times over the years that this dissertation is a way of theorizing every mistake I made at the newspaper, but, really, what stands out to me now are the friendships that still endure from those late nights. It took a moment of realizing that Ben Wheeler and I had been having the same iii recursive conversation about Paul Auster’s City of Glass for more than ten years to help me find an organizing principle for this work. I thank my friends and colleagues for their support over many years. It has been extraordinary to see my cohort at Columbia grow into extraordinary scholars, teachers, and friends over the years. Fred Bengtsson, Jen Buckley, Alicia DeSantis, Tara Gellene, Marina Graham, Musa Gurnis, Mary Kate Hurley, Adam Hooks, Alvan Ikoku, Abigail Joseph, Anjuli Raza Kolb, Ruth Lexton, Sara Murphy, Adela Ramos, Christine Varnado, and many others have been my wonderful interlocutors, editors, teaching colleagues, and sounding board. Tove Hermanson and Jeffrey Leib, Laura Hydak, Clare Johnson and Dino Valaoritis, Graham Moore, Jon Rick, Jaime Sneider, Megan Spence and Shawn McDonald, Ben Wheeler and Kate Cortesi, and the staff of Alice’s Tea Cup offered their hospitality and in so doing helped me find a sense of home in so many places over the years. Katy Aronoff, Stephanie Bengtsson, Ross McSweeney, Heather Ohaneson, Nick Osbourne, Patrick Ciccone, Ben Vershbow, and Sean Westmoreland have all inspired me in my search for creative errors. The entire McSweeney family has been extraordinarily kind to me over the years; Brette McSweeney deserves special thanks for her hospitality and generosity. My family has been very supportive of my long journey. I am sure that I developed my love for technology and learning from my grandfather, James L. Boone, Jr., who taught industrial education, and my father, James L. Boone, III, who teaches archaeology. My step-mother, Sue Ruth, shares those two interests, as well. My step- father, Clement Jackson, was the person who first piqued my interest in Douglas iv Hofstadter and recursive jokes. My mother, Lea Ann Boone, has been my biggest supporter and best idea-generator over the years, and I cannot thank her enough. She helped me copy-edit this project, although I am sure that I have introduced even more errors into it as I have revised it! I regret those errors—and yet, that is also the thesis of this