Pseudo Documentarism in Classical Literature Article

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Pseudo-Documentarism in Classical Lit

PREFACE: MUNDUS VULT DECIPI

-oY tambien se salvaron los que le clavaron los clavos?

-Si -replico Espinosa, cuya teologia era incierta.

Jorge Luis Borges, "El Evangelio segun Marcos"

Housman, in preparing his critical edition of the text of Lucan in 1927, had memorably sharp words for his predecessor C.M. Francken: "The width and variety of his ignorance are wonderful; it embraces mythology, palaeography, prosody, and astronomy, and he cannot keep it to himself" (Housman xxxiv-v). Were Housman alive today, he might lacked such capacity for wonder -- these days, what is one German philologist compared to the Internet? On the Internet, the width and variety of human ignorance can seem all-embracing, and may push our wonder into stupefaction or exhaustion.

Even so, the methods of textual criticism retain an extraordinary utility in the era of the Internet. Textual criticism aims at discovering the phylogeny of error; meanwhile computers, and the Internet, are engines for the replication of text. A work that might have taken a monastic scribe weeks to transcribe can now be replicated with a simple keystroke.

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It is no accident that "viral" is a key adjective in describing the progress of information in the Internet age -- it implies replication without sense. Ecdotics, and the study of cladistics and stemmata, are precisely relevant to the way the Internet works. The only difference is that mistakes made on the Internet can be transmitted globally, and multiplied a thousandfold, almost instantaneously.

Let us consider the simple Latin sententia "mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur." A computer user in early 2008 might have encountered this tag in reading the New York Times blog of economist (and future Nobel Prize winner) Paul Krugman. A different computer user in 2008….....

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