Dual Texts in the 20C American Novel 3 April 2013

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts DUAL TEXTS IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL A Dissertation in English by Michael D. DuBose © 2013 Michael D. DuBose Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2013 The dissertation of Michael D. DuBose was approved* by the following: James L. W. West III Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English Director, Penn State Center for the History of the Book Dissertation Adviser Chair of Dissertation Committee Sandra Spanier Professor of English General Editor, Hemingway Letters Project Hester Blum Associate Professor of English Interim Associate Director, Institute for the Arts and Humanities William Blair College of the Liberal Arts Research Professor Director of the Richards Civil War Era Center Mark Morrison Department Head Professor of English and IST *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ii Abstract My dissertation examines the publication of and issues related to single stories that exist in more than one version—what I term “dual texts.” This phenomenon occurs across the literary landscape, but has gone relatively uninvestigated with regard to the twentieth century. My analysis looks at major writers and texts with unique composition histories and concludes with a discussion of e-reader technology and the challenges facing textual stability in the future. This dissertation uses textual analysis and the principles related to scholarly editing as its chief methodological strategy. Dual texts are put into play by a variety of agents, from editors (commercial and scholarly) and literary executors to the authors themselves. This project analyzes the major differences between dual texts and investigates the reasoning behind their production. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments v Introduction 1 1 From “Absolution” through Trimalchio to The Great Gatsby: Dual Textuality and 17 Reconception 2 True at First Light and Under Kilimanjaro: The “African Book” in Two Parts 42 3 Gentlemen, I Address You Privately and the Artist as a Young and Old Woman 79 4 Tried, Revised, Excised: Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine as Triple Text 116 5 The Dual Text Reality: E-Books, Reading Technology, and the Digitization of Life 163 Notes 197 Works Cited 214 iv Acknowledgements First and foremost, I want to thank my dissertation adviser and committee chair, James L. W. West III, for his encouragement, guidance, and patience through this project. I also want to extend thanks to Sandra Spanier, Hester Blum, and William Blair for their willingness to participate on this committee—even when the focus changed after comprehensive exams. I have been fortunate to have a committee comprised of scholars generous with their expertise and support. I would also like to thank the Society for Textual Scholarship, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, the Kay Boyle Society, and the Ernest Hemingway Society for the feedback I received on the various parts of this project presented at their conferences. Robert Trogdon, specifically, has been a friend and supporter of my efforts. The Pennsylvania State University English Department has been a wonderful sponsor of my education, development, and scholarship. I am especially grateful for the generous financial support I have received for my research and conference travel. The Center for American Literary Studies has likewise provided wonderful speakers and programs that have shaped my thinking about this dissertation. I would like to thank Sandra Spanier again for allowing me the opportunity to work on the Hemingway Letters Project. It has been the most important experience in my training as a graduate student Lastly, I would like to thank my family and friends for tolerating my absence from home while starting, generating, and completing this dissertation—this goes tenfold for my parents, Lori and Dewey DuBose. v Dedicated to Ruby L. Dunn. Thank you, grandma, for everything. vi Introduction Single texts have existed in multiple versions since readers first began to conceptualize the possibility of a single text. Manuscript culture itself presupposes the circulation of multiple copies of a text; human fallibility and/or creativity necessitates that variations will occur in the acts of transcription, exchange, and repeated transcription. Eventually, a single piece of literature evolves into multiple pieces, and one text becomes multiple texts. The scholarly editor’s challenge originally was to filter, emend, and (re)create that original, single authorial creation that would serve as the foundational text. The editor’s ability to achieve the ideal text depends on the existence, availability, and quality of the materials at hand. In some cases, as with sacred texts, the sensitivity and scarcity of documents leaves projects perpetually ongoing. In other disciplines, such as performance, it is nearly impossible to recreate the original presentation of a piece. No matter how comprehensive the evidence, one cannot account for the taste of a conductor, director, or performer let alone the historical contexts of time and place. As authorship has developed into a marketable profession, so too have the number and availability of manuscripts and pre-publication documents. More documents require more editorial judgment and thus more interpretation. When so many issues must be resolved subjectively, disagreements are inevitable. Even accepted “final” scholarly editions might be improved or changed as new minds tackle old problems. The fate of few texts is ever finally sealed. Editorial philosophy and social expectations change from one generation to the next; scholarly editions will reflect these changes. One could hardly have expected that Twain’s Huckleberry Finn would be edited to exclude the word “nigger” in the twenty-first century, yet a scholar has recently done just that (Kakutani C1). This edition has met with fierce resistance, but how will it be regarded in fifty 1 more years? A hundred? What parts of the canon will future societies deem unacceptable? Every generation will feature an editor who presents a newer and further “improved” text. The cycle continues as scholars aspire to editorial perfection. Multiple texts begin to be more and more ubiquitous. Occasionally, even mainstream America can be drawn into issues related to textuality. In the vitriolic, drawn-out campaign for the Republican Presidential Nomination, dual texts became a point of contention between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney. Perry accused Romney of changing his 2010 book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, between the hardback and paperback editions. In a September 2011 debate, Perry charged that the first edition of Romney’s book argued for individual health insurance mandates (as were legislated during Romney’s tenure as Massachusetts governor) for the entire country. President Obama had cited the insurance policies put into place under Romney as part of the model for his own health insurance legislation. For a collection of primary candidates battling for the Republican base, Obama’s statement became a lightning rod for criticism of the Romney campaign. Perry, desperate to gain traction in the contest, made the changes in Romney’s book a principal element of his political strategy. The crux of Perry’s argument lies in an eleven-word revision in chapter seven, titled “The Massachusetts Model.” In the original edition, the offending (to Perry) sentence reads: “We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country, and it can be done without letting government take over health care.” The revised sentence sounds more generic: “And it was done without government taking over health care” (“Says that Romney . .”). Perry’s attack, of course, relied on taking this sentence out of context and weighing it against remarks from politicians that were unrelated to Romney’s positions. For Perry, the changed text made the books exceptionally 2 different; Romney’s political ambitions were secondary to his policy positions. There was now undeniable proof in the form of a dual text. Perry’s claims forced the press covering the Republican Primary to act the part of the textual scholar. A Pulitzer Prize-winning project from the Tampa Bay Times, Politifact.com, concluded: “Perry's right that Romney's comments about health care were edited between editions,” but disagreed with Perry about the import of the differences. “Perry exaggerates by making it sound as though Romney had advocated his state's plan as national health care policy. That's not what Romney wrote. We rule Perry's claim Mostly False” (“Says that Romney . .”). The attention called to No Apology caused other reporters to make a comparison of the two texts. Writing for the Boston Phoenix, David S. Bernstein traced the additions and excisions Romney made to his book between editions. He discovered Romney certainly tried harder in the second text to firmly articulate his disapproval of Obama’s health care legislation. Even if Perry was wrong (or “Mostly False”), the accusation drew attention to No Apology and to what Romney (at least at the time of publication) thought about policy and what he feared that his first version did not make clear. The now-likely Republican nominee appears to have thought he needed to shore up his conservative, anti-Obama credentials in the paperback version of the book. This example will ultimately become a footnote in the long history of American political theater. The issue does show, however, that there can be serious consequences to altering texts once they are in the public sphere. For Rick Perry and his supporters, every anxiety circulating around Mitt Romney’s presidential aspirations could be captured in this one moment of perceived textual duplicity. In the political climate of the 2012 Republican Primary, there was certainly a chance that Perry could have captured the Republican base with this attack if he had 3 been more deft in his delivery; however, Perry’s own fumbling performances in the primary debates became the bigger story as the race went on.

Load more