On the Archeological Methods of Genetic Criticism

Excerpt from video above:

Hey there everyone. Today I'd like to introduce you to the field of genetic criticism, a field of literary studies concerned with empirically studying the text as a historically contingent artifact. I'm going to be explaining some of the traditions in literary studies that this is coming out of, and some of the contentions, quips, and theorizations that it makes along the way. 

At the heart of genetic criticism is the understanding that theoretical frameworks themselves presuppose some aspects of the object that they study. So literary studies supposes some things about the literary text. It supposes some ideas of finality, that, for example when I have a text and it is published, this is the final edition, and this is the one that we read. So it also brings into question a number of aspects of publishing, and of consumership, and readership, and writing. And genetic criticism wants to look at the text and really deconstruct the idea of the text as such. Instead of looking at, for example, "Finnegan's Wake" as THE text, the 1939 edition that has been printed, instead of seeing THAT as THE text we see it as A text. And this is in line with an observation made by Gilles Deleuze, who says that we need to shift from talking of the world in "essences" to "historically contingent processes" which allow for multiplicity instead of reducing things to singular unitary essences.