Soru

Passage A
For much of the twentieth century, Anglo-American textual criticism was dominated by the copy-text method formulated by W. W. Greg and institutionalized by Fredson Bowers. Confronting the dilemma of historical works surviving across multiple imperfect printings, Greg posited a crucial division between “substantives”—the actual words that convey semantic meaning—and “accidentals,” which encompass spelling, punctuation, and typographical formatting. Because sixteenth- and seventeenth-century compositors routinely altered accidentals according to house style or whim while generally preserving substantives, Greg reasoned that an author's earliest extant manuscript or first edition should serve as the authoritative baseline for accidentals. However, if authorial revisions were subsequently introduced into later printings, an editor was justified in grafting those revised substantives onto the early copy-text.

The ultimate telos of Bowers’s rigorous extension of this method is the realization of an idealized, eclectic text representing the author’s “final intentions.” Under this paradigm, the editor functions not as a passive transcriber of any single historical artifact, but as an active restorer. By stripping away extraneous corruptions introduced by printers, scribes, and commercial intermediaries, the editor purges the historical document of contingent industrial contamination. The resulting critical edition is an idealized construct—one that may never have existed as a physical object during the author's lifetime, yet uniquely fulfills the sovereign, autonomous creative vision of the individual author.

Passage B
Beginning in the early 1980s, the conceptual hegemony of the Greg-Bowers intentionalist model faced a formidable challenge from textual theorists advancing a sociological approach, most prominently Jerome McGann. McGann argued that the pursuit of an autonomous, uncorrupted “authorial intention” rests on a romanticized myth of solitary artistic creation. Literature, in the sociological view, is inherently a socialized production: writing is transformed into literature only through a complex institutional apparatus involving publishers, editors, typesetters, censors, and reading publics. To treat the intervention of compositors or publishing houses as mere “contamination” to be excised is to misunderstand the material conditions of literary transmission.

Consequently, sociological textual critics reject the fabrication of eclectic, ahistorical texts. An author’s intentions are never static or purely psychological; they are continuously negotiated within institutional constraints. When an editor amalgamates the accidentals of an early manuscript with the substantives of a late revised edition, the resulting composite text obliterates the specific historical moments in which the work was encountered by contemporary audiences. Rather than constructing an artificial monument to an idealized authorial consciousness, textual scholarship should privilege the document as a situated material event, preserving the distinct, historically specific versions of a text as witnesses to the evolving cultural dialogue between authors and their socio-institutional networks.

Based on the passages, match each methodological premise or theoretical characterization with its corresponding function within the comparative debate.