The Deconstruction of the Text: [Textual] Criticism and Deconstruction:*

Behind the Scenes at ApertureScience.com: Portal and Its Paratexts

“…These questions all point to the challenges of studying born-digital materials such as video games, both as historical artifacts and as texts within larger transmedia properties. These questions also have a history in the study of other media forms, including print and manuscript books, visual art, and recorded music (Greetham, 2010). In this article, I take up the classic video game Portal (2007) to consider how paratextuality and the associated concepts of ephemerality and materiality may reveal new dimensions of video games as objects of interpretation and play.…”

“…To understand the materiality of video games I also draw from the field of textual studies, which is related to but distinct from literary studies, and which specializes in the particularities of media and the entanglement of technical detail with interpretation and meaning (Fraistat & Flanders, 2012;Greetham, 2010). Textual studies as a field is regrettably absent in the foundational work of paratextual theory, Genette's Paratexts, which sidesteps consideration of editions, formats, and other bibliographical facts in its discussion of books (1997, p. 5, n. 9;Jones, 2008, pp.…”

Inferior Readings: The Transmigration of 'Material' in <i>Tamburlaine the Great</i>

“…D.C. Greetham argues that 'the "rejected" readings' of supposedly corrupt versions of a text 'have at some time been accepted by some readers (scribes or compositors) as part of the text, and their status as variants is therefore only ever contingent, just as is the status of the accepted reading'. 13 Although they may be seeking to recover the ideal, authorial version of a text, then, modern editors are a part of the process of that text's material mediation; through the ideological patterns they establish with their rejection or acceptance of variant readings, modern editors shape that text in ways that are as contingent and socially inflected as the corruptions they seek to eliminate. Examining the 'ways in which their [Renaissance] texts are transformed, often disfigured, by the twentiethcentury editorial processes to which they have been subjected', Leah Marcus in Unediting the Renaissance warns against 'the constricting hermeneutic knot by which the shaping hand of the editor is mistaken for the intent of the author, or for some lost, "perfect" version of the author's creation'.…”

“…Nonetheless, the emendation of the definite to the indefinite article reduces the robe's symbolic significance and allows the emphasis to fall on its massy nature. 'A' robe is merely one more item in the list of material objects that precede it, and it generates the kind of anticlimax provoked by the 'an earthly crown' (1.2.7.29) with which Tamburlaine in Part One concludes his speech on the transcendent nature of human aspiration (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29). The indefinite article tilts the interpretation of the passage towards the material.…”