The Vicissitudes of Text

The concept of text, which has been central to literary studies, has undergone many mutations, as it has traveled from the work of classical philologists, for whom it was and is the object of a powerful disciplinary formation, to postmodern theorists of the text, for whom, the concept might be summed up by the title of a fine book by John Mowatt: Text: the Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Of course, the interesting thing about a travelling concept is not that it travels — travelers, t..