THE GUTENBERG VARIATIONS

Abstract

Say “textual scholarship” and think “dryasdust,” and then perhaps see an obsessed St. Jerome alone in a cave or a monk’s study humped over a great tome with a pen in his hand, a skull and an hourglass somewhere nearby, and perhaps a lion and a dog sprawled at his feet. That complex figural expression was one of the central emblems of the Renaissance, when textuality—powered by the Gutenberg revolution—fairly came to define “the human condition” as a textual condition. But a certain kind of textual condition, a condition of “The Word” conceived as written or printed, a Word to . . .