Soru

For decades, the dominant methodological paradigm in Anglo-American textual criticism was the Greg-Bowers copy-text theory. This approach tasked the scholarly editor with recovering an author’s final, unmediated intentions by rigorously stripping away the accumulated "corruptions" introduced by scribes, typists, and compositors. Grounded in an intentionalist framework, this theory treats the literary work as the emanative property of a solitary genius, implicitly viewing the transition from manuscript to print as a sequence of progressive degradations. However, beginning in the late twentieth century, "social-text" theorists forcefully challenged this paradigm. Arguing that literary production is inherently a collaborative, socio-material event, social-text theorists posit that the interventions of publishers, copyeditors, and typesetters are not parasitic corruptions but rather constitutive elements of a text’s historical ontology. To attempt to isolate a purely authorial intention, they argue, is to chase an epistemological phantom; the public meaning of a text is inextricably bound to the collective mechanisms of its material production and its initial reception.

Based on the passage, a social-text theorist would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements concerning the transition of a literary work from its manuscript phase to its published form?