David Greetham (October 21, 1941 – March 24, 2020) was an American literary critic and the founder of the Society for Textual Scholarship.

Career

Greetham received his undergraduate degree from the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

in 1963 and completed his Ph.D. in English at the

City University of New York The City University of New York ( CUNY; , ) is the Public university, public university system of Education in New York City, New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven Upper divis ...

. Marta Werner of

D'Youville College D'Youville University (D'Youville or DYU) is a private university in Buffalo, New York. It was founded as D'Youville College in 1908 and named by the Grey Nuns after the patroness saint Marie-Marguerite d'Youville. As of Fall 2020 D'Youville Co ...

describes Greetham as "drawn to texts that spill over the boundaries of genre, that exist in multiple versions, that explore intertextuality, and that complicate in various other ways the notion of text as fixed or stable." In his works, Greetham has sought to co-opt "the terminology and practice of literary theory in re-designating textual operations in the guise of ... literature, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, history, political science, linguistics, psychology, ndphilosophy." As a theorist of scholarly editing, Greetham has taken up a middle ground between intentionalist positions like that of G. Thomas Tanselle and the social textual criticism of

Jerome McGann Jerome John McGann (born July 22, 1937) is an American academic and textual scholar whose work focuses on the history of literature and culture from the late eighteenth century to the present. Career Educated at Le Moyne College (B.S. 1959), Sy ...

, maintaining the goal of establishing an authoritative text while allowing the possibility that multiple authorized versions can exist. In his later work, Greetham has moved away from the idea that an editor can establish a "psychic" connection with the author through which he or she can determine the author's true intentions, instead seeing editing as an occasion for reflections on the ideology underlying scholarly practice. Greetham died on March 24, 2020, from a long-illness at the age of 78.

Society for Textual Scholarship

Greetham was one of the founders of the Society for Textual Scholarship and served as the Society's President from 1999 to 2001. Founded in 1979, the Society provides an interdisciplinary forum for presentation of research in a number of textual disciplines. Notable past members have included G. Thomas Tanselle,

Paul Oskar Kristeller Paul Oskar Kristeller (May 22, 1905 in Berlin – June 7, 1999 in New York, United States) was an important scholar of Renaissance humanism. He was awarded the Haskins Medal in 1992. He was last active as Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Colum ...

Fredson Bowers Fredson Thayer Bowers (April 25, 1905 – April 11, 1991) was an American bibliographer and scholar of textual editing. Life Bowers was a graduate of Brown University and Harvard University (Ph.D.). He taught at Princeton University before mov ...

, and

Selected works

* ''The Pleasures of Contamination'' (2010) * ''Theories of the Text'' (1999) * ''Textual Transgressions: Essays Toward the Construction of a Biobibliography'' (1998) * ''The Margins of the Text: Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism'' (1997) * ''Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research'' (1995) * ''Textual Scholarship: An Introduction'' (1992) * ''TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies'' (1984)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Greetham, David Textual scholarship 1941 births 2020 deaths People from Lenox, Massachusetts