focuses on the integrity of the textual history the structural contextuality of texts and their variants the role of critical interpretation to balance and neutralize, if not to eliminate outright, authorial intention as a principle guiding editorial procedures. (Hans-Walter Gabler)

Primary aim is to study the avant-texte, not so much as the basis to set out editorial principles for textual representation, but as a means to understand the genesis of the literary work.

"it does not aim to reconstitute the optimal text of a work; rather, it aims to reconstitute the writing process which resulted in the work, based on surviving traces, which are primarily author's draft manuscripts." (Daniel Ferrer)

→ encoding: Text / Apparatus

→ encoding: Simple Documentary Sources / Print editions / (generated) Apparatus

→ encoding: Display

"Handzeichnungen [haben] das höchste Interesse, indem man das Wunder sieht, dass der ganze Geist unmittelbar in die Fertigkeit der Hand übergeht, die nun mit der grössen Liechtigkeit, ohne Versuch, in augenblicklicher Produktion alles, was im Geiste des Künstlers liegt, hinstellt." (Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik).

"manuscrits qui font partie d'une genèse textuelle attestée par plusieurs témoins successifs et qui manifestent le travail d'écriture d'un auteur." (Almuth Grésillon)

manuscripts which form part of the genesis of a text

manuscripts which form part of the genesis of a text

manuscripts which form part of the transmission history of a text

All manuscript variants can be expressed as substitutions

"There has never been a single standard convention for the transcription of manuscript texts, and it is not likely that there ever will be one, given the great variety of textual complications that manuscripts—from all times and places—can present." (David Vander Meulen & G. Thomas Tanselle)

A writing process (by definition) takes place in Time

Unlike a written text, a speech event takes place in time. Its beginning and end may be hard to determine and its internal composition difficult to define. Most researchers agree that the utterances or turns of individual speakers form an important structural component in most kinds of speech, but these are rarely as well-behaved (in the structural sense) as paragraphs or other analogous units in written texts: speakers frequently interrupt each other, use gestures as well as words, leave remarks unfinished and so on. Speech itself, though it may be represented as words, frequently contains items such as vocalized pauses which, although only semi-lexical, have immense importance in the analysis of spoken text. Even non-vocal elements such as gestures may be regarded as forming a component of spoken text for some analytic purposes. Below the level of the individual utterance, speech may be segmented into units defined by phonological, prosodic, or syntactic phenomena; no clear agreement exists, however, even as to appropriate names for such segments.

The dynamic writing process is a complex internal monologue

problems:

"L'appareillage institutionel et technique de la génétique textuelle ne saurait faire oublier que l'objet qu'elle se donne échappe presque par définition à la 'science.' Ce que scrute la génétique textuelle, c'est en effet un inobservable, un inobjectivable: l'origine même de l'oeuvre littéraire." (Laurent Jenny, Divagations généticiennes.)

The institutional and technical machinery of textual genetics should not blind us to the fact that the object that it purports to study will almost by definition escape "science". What textual genetics studies is in effect something that cannot be observed, that cannot become an object: the origin itself of the literary work. (trans. Geert Lernout)