Hershel Parker writes about the benefits of "an approach to American fiction which employs bibliographical, biographical, textual, and historical research and which raises questions properly discussed by literary theorists and aestheticians." He calls this approach - which, specifically, "reveals the aesthetic implications of biographical and textural evidence" and "shows how facts about composition, revision, and publication can affect interpretation" - New Scholarship. As an example of the benefit of this kind of criticism, he mentions the study of the manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage, which revealed that "all criticism written on Red Badge before 1978 is flawed because it was written on the basis of a badly maimed text...which was expurgated to removed Henry Fleming's petulant controversies with the Universe and to disguise his final vainglory and cynical self-congratulation." He also mentions the study of the manuscript of Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, which revealed that the novel was cobbled together by Twain from drafts of failed novels, and suggested that any remarks about the book's aesthetic unity were misguided.
The study of manuscripts and other historical documents related to a work of fiction might reveal a great deal about how an author wrote a work, which might be very interesting and valuable. But, to my mind, this remains biographical study, not literary criticism. What Parker is really saying with this article is that New Scholars, as he calls them, can do better literary criticism, because they can understand an author's intentions better. But Parker is still in thrall to the - to my mind, at least after reading McGann - naive idea that a work of literature is nothing other than an expression of its author's conscious intentions, which critics are meant to try to discern.
Of course, it interests me to know that Twain put Pudd'nhead Wilson together from fragments of drafts of other novels. But that doesn't affect my reading of Pudd'nhead Wilson - or, at least, I'd rather it didn't. Just because a work of art was assembled in haphazard fashion does not mean that that work of art cannot achieve aesthetic unity. Twain might have hoped no one would notice the book's lack of unity - as Parker suggests - or he might have felt that, despite the book's motley elements, it achieved unity anyway - or he might not have thought about that at all, but, given that some critics see unity in the book, it might nevertheless be there. Even the maimed edition of The Red Badge of Courage - that book, as the product of an author and an editor, might effect its own thematic resonances, which we couldn't say aren't there simply because we found out later that the book had been expurgated against the author's inclinations.
Kafka's "Metamorphosis" is often praised for its eerily consistent flatness of tone, despite the nightmarish events it describes. When we read, in Kafka's journal, that Kafka felt the book was "flawed to its very marrow" and "would have turned out much better if not for the three day business trip" he had to take during its composition, does that mean we have to revise our impression of the story's tone? Parker would probably suggest that suck knowledge would allow us to "know better" how to read the work. But I'd rather study what the text on the page in front of me does and can do, rather than restricting its possible effects by the constraints of biographical knowledge - which really never amounts to knowledge at all, since no matter how many jouranls and letters and manuscripts we study, we're not going to get into any other person's head.
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