Print Culture, You're Doing It Wrong

Two grumpy posts in a row... I must be ready for Spring Break.

Lacqueline Labbe's chapter titled "The possibilities of print" regarding Charlotte Smith exemplifies the pitfalls of print culture studies. Labbe's project (for the chapter) is clear: read Smith as a proto-feminist poet in every way possible, including paratextually. Thus Labbe's hypothesis, "When Smith explores the periphery, does she do so because its marginality allows for the voicing of the socially unspeakable, and the portrayal of the socially invisible?" (23). The chapter then proceeds to answer the question with the expected, "Yes," by close reading Smith's prefaces and footnotes under the loose auspices of Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language.

Though I find some holes in Labbe's reading of the paratexts (The footnotes becomes progressively more anti-authoritarian? The illustrations "testify to the complexities of selfhood?" & "play with the ideas of the gendered body and complicate the embodied Self insisted on by the frontispiece and the prefaces?" And how on Earth can you claim to be performing print culture analysis and talk about the poet "speak[ing] in her own voice? & "speak[ing] 'for real' rather than as the construct 'Charlotte Smith?'") my central concern is with Labbe's ambition to use paratextual analysis to reconstruct an imaginary, ideal, proto-feminist author.

Labbe is engaged in the august project of searching for the "Writer behind the Poet" (49); she incorporates the paratext into a hermetic of the author: "Earlier notes seem to function as camouflage" (48). For her, print studies is only a means of representational literary studies of modern political causes (feminism, Marxism, populism, etc.)

In my opinion, the possibilities of print studies extend far beyond authorial reconstruction/preservation/renovation. Or, more fairly, not beyond these kinds of projects, but in directions other than them. Labbe approaches one of these alternatives when discussing Smith as legal construct. A thorough analysis of the additional hurdles of publishing in the late 18th century as a woman could engage Labbe's feminism and feature Smith as a typical or exceptional historical character without resorting to occasionally contorted readings of (para)textual manifestations for evidence.