Paul Seydor in his 1980 PECKINPAH: THE WESTERN FILMS was exploring in film precisely the sort of textual problems I was exploring in American novels. In FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS I pointed to his chapter on THE WILD BUNCH "as an analysis of the aesthetic implications of textual evidence so much like my own work that I wish I had written it, for with a change in my subtitle it could have been run into this book." At the University of California in the mid and late 70s Seydor and I had been pursuing parallel courses until Henry Binder pointed out the mutual affinities. Later I paid tribute to Seydor in my "me and Paul" article in the Fall 1995 STUDIES IN THE NOVEL, "The Auteur-Author Paradox: How Critics of the Cinema and the Novel Talk about Flawed or Even 'Mutilated' Texts."
Good criticism and good scholarship are timeless.
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