Vanishing Transliteracies in Beowulf and Samuel Pepys’s Diary

Summary

To study the institutional identity of a text as well as the function of textual institutions relies, then, on analyzing both the inaugural function of the text, its power to be foundational and to provide a historical beginning, and its monumental function, the strategies whereby it not only testifies to that beginning but also transcends it by serving as a fixed model for specific future (perhaps not only textual) behavior. These strategies gain their authority by strategically ‘forgetting’ and then recoding in a ‘monumental’ textual form the historicity of the inaugural moment as a moment beyond and outside history.

THIS ESSAY EXPLORES how media history and the printed book's place within it contribute to the institutional identity of literature, and how the institutional strategies by which these past documents became and maintain their authority as literary artefacts have resulted in various forms of the ‘strategic forgetting and recoding’ that Jane Newman notes in the quotation above. When we started this essay, we chose two disparate literary works from our respective periods of specialisation, Beowulf and Samuel Pepys's Diary, for the simple reason that they both were discovered as written documents, became literature through printed editions and scholarship, and now have innovative electronic resources for their reading and study. What we did not expect were the surprising and complicated homologies of transliteracies, alternative media and their dismediation/dematerialisation that arose between them.

As with literary criticism, the field of media studies frequently has, in Timothy Druckery's words, applied a ‘lazy linearity’ to the historical formation of its subject. For most of their existence, both literary and media studies have espoused an evolutionary model of development, where the technological expressive mechanisms of the present day become a proleptic standard, privileging the lineage of their precursors over other forms of communication and information management that may have existed in the past. In general, literary criticism has a hard time imagining any kind of discursive past outside a logocentric progression of the oral to the written to the printed. Up until a century ago, literature by technological necessity had its material origin as a handwritten text, even if at one point it had been oral. Until very, very recently, to be considered literature a text must have been printed, usually in book form, and often as an edition or in an anthology.