See how Andy Hines relates to Jerry W. Ward, Jr. I think you can get Ward if you Search here.

 

 

Andy Hines quoting the 1984 FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS--AN OUTSIDER QUOTES AN OKIE

 

Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University

A Hines - 2022

… As Hershel Parker put it in commenting on the New Criticism’s tendency toward
unity, the New Critics “define their role as bringing order out of a chaos which they
insist is only apparent, not real. The order must be there, awaiting the sufficiently …

Hines adds: .

Sunday, December 18, 2011

 

How Critics in Fields Other than American Literature Have Applied FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS

            In 2007 while inching along a friend’s bookshelves in Manhattan I realized that my Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons had not, after all, been totally destroyed and forgotten. The general trashing was still vivid in my memory. Most of the reviewers quite rabidly tried to kill it--either to protect the New Criticism (at that late date) or to defend the not-yet discredited Greg-Bowers editorial theory and practice. In the Sewanee Review the critic (Gary Davenport) pretty much said if I were right Western Civilization would crumble, since it is built on belief in the Word. I was going straight to Hell. Before and after 1984 several of my articles were suppressed after being accepted although all of them got into print eventually (one after 20 years, in which editor after editor cringed in fear of Fredson Bowers). I have bought an IRIS scanner and hope to post at least one suppressed article on this blog.
            After 1985 I had to make a new career as a biographer—not the worst of fates, it began to seem. Remembering the comments I had seen in my friend’s books, in mid-July 2008 I glanced at Amazon's new list of anyone's books that cite references by relevance or date, in my case mainly books where the authors cite an edition of Melville I have edited, that sort of casual thing. You could, at least for some months longer, see from the listings on Amazon if anything of substance had been said about the book. I ended up spending several hours on the Amazon list for Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons, then I went down Google Books listings for it. I was astounded at what has been said in the years after the reviews were all in. Now, a quarter century later, the reputation of Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons is high, except with people who had committed themselves to praise of one seriously flawed text or another, and their loyal students.
            What's most interesting is that an astonishing range of scholars--editors of the Bible! Classicists! Medievalists! Shakespearians! Musicologists! "Conservationists"! Students of the Modern British Novel—have earnestly applied Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons to problems they were grappling with. And in 2010 my 1981 ground-breaking preview of FT&VI, “The ‘New Scholarship’: Textual Evidence and its Implications for Criticism, Literary Theory, and Aesthetics,” was reprinted as the lead article in Ecdotica 6, Anglo-American Scholarly Editing, 1980-2005. I prepared this list in the hope that Northwestern would use it in an advertisement, a “Quarterly Report”—FT&VI, a quarter century later. That did not happen, but never mind--I’m glad to have lived long enough to see the book being used! And I am particularly moved and honored by what Jerry W. Ward, Jr., said about it in the 2008 The Katrina Papers.