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Textual Forensics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

D. C. Greetham
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Abstract

Because textual scholarship, having no definable Fach, or subject matter, is an exemplary postmodernist antidiscipline, it can serve as a site for testing the epistemological assumptions and protocols of the current debate over the status of evidence and the nature of proof. Since text is “authority” and “original” and yet also “network” and “tissue” and since forensics encompasses both hard physical “facts” and the rhetorical formulation that gives such data interpretive meaning, a textual forensics will codify and test the interaction of the phenomenological world and the hermeneutic analysis of its evidence. With procedural and conceptual links both to scientific empiricism and to rhetorical strategies for persuasion, textual scholarship becomes a vehicle for anatomizing the postmodernist breakdown of the master narratives, including that of evidence and proof.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 111 , Issue 1: Special Topic The Status of Evidence , January 1996 , pp. 32 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1996

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