Re ms of FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS--why diaries should be burned

—came across Christmas Day 2011. GG = Gerald Graff, then head of Northwestern University Press.

6 June 1983
Harry [on phone] . . . said at lunch wi GTT and GG last week he had suggested GG have Don Cook read the MS. I told HH I thought Cleanth Brooks or Wayne C. Booth might be more like it. I sd “It’s theoretical—its impact will be in critical theory,” and HH pronounced, “But it’s about editing.”. . .

Recommended: Paul Seydor's PECKINPAH: THE WESTERN FILMS: A RECONSIDERATION

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."