Genetic Criticism and its Logics: The Draft and the Text

by Daniel Ferrer, Rachel Bowlby (Translator)

Overview

Still quite new to the critical world, genetic criticism is the study of authors’ drafts and manuscripts. Whereas textual criticism aims to establish definitive versions, genetic criticism looks at everything that gets discarded along the way to a final text.

Genetic Criticism and its Logics offers a series of enchantingly nugatory chapters of argument and philosophy that serve to illuminate this controversial new branch of criticism. It is meant for readers at any stage of the genetic journey—from the keen to the curious, and from the not yet convinced to the seriously sceptical or dismissive. All of them, it is guaranteed, will find they are delighted as well as informed by Daniel Ferrer’s writing. For the novice in literary criticism, too, the book will open up new worlds of possible questions as well as a specific new field of thinking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399539395
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	03/31/2025
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Daniel Ferrer is Professeur Emeritus (and former director) at the Institut des Textes Modernes et Manuscrits, Paris. He is one of the leading proponents of genetic criticism and the author of Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language (1990) and Genetic Joyce (2023).

Rachel Bowlby is Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at UniversityCollege London. Most recently, she is the author of Unexpected Items: Shopping, Parenthood, Changing Feminist Stories (2024) and Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life (2025).

Table of Contents

1. Eppur si muove
2. Marey’s Cat and Moses’ Beard
3. The Counter-model of ‘Fable’
4. The Raven and the Beetle
5. Repetition vs. Invention: The Philological Counter-Model
6. Repetition and Invention: Picasso’s False Draft
7. Musical Score and Cookery Recipe
8. The Raven and the Parrot
9. The Art of Using up Leftovers
10. Exogenous and Endogenous Accidents: Joyce’s Ink Blot and Stendhal’s Fountain
11. The European Model
12. Emerging Structure and Path Dependency
13. Anamorphosis and Station Toilets
14. Chryselephantine Charlie Chaplin
15. Anti-Descriptivism and Retrospective Distribution
16. The Model of Models: The Avant-Texte
17. The Aporias of the Avant-Texte: The Shabby Gate and the Dripping Sketch
18. Ulysses’ Scars
19. Memories of the Context: The Clementis Effect (or Hat-Trick)
20. Freudian Enunciation and Scrambled Eggs with Truffles
21. Bathmology and Dialogism
22. A Marginalist Economy of Writing
23. Agrammaticalities and Diasystems
24. Dialogism and the Genetic Process of Films
25. Variants and Variations: The Beethoven Sonata and Hogarth’s Dog
26. Possible Worlds: Jupiter the Genetic Critic
27. Possible Worlds and Modal Logic
28. Worlds Compared and Worlds Stipulated
29. Textual Worlds and Fictive Worlds
30. Incomplete Worlds?
31. Enallages of Modality and Modal Realism
32. Necessary?
33. Accessibilities: The Symphony and the Telephone
34. Worldmaking

Annotated List of the Models
List of Illustrations
Bibliography of Works Cited

Editorial Reviews

This absorbing book, by one of the world’s leading exponents of genetic criticism, will dispel any idea that the study of writers’ and artists’ draft material is a dry and dusty topic. If you are going to read one book on genetic criticism, this virtuoso survey of its challenges and rewards should be it.

Derek Attridge