Textual transmission
02 Oct 2006Okay, so normally that term has pretty acceptable/well defined semantics… but what’s a “report[s] of textual transmission” in a fictional work?
I just wanna get a big doubleyew-tee-eff out there about that one. In full: “Dracula‘s reports of textual transmission ground its supernatural story in material reality.” My thoughts exactly. Dracula = the text by Stoker. “reports of textual transmission” = wtf1. There’s possibly a wtf2 in there but that hinges on interpretation of wtf1 so I’m not going to bother declaring it. Meh.
The only idea I have is that the “reports” bit is entirely redundant and it is speaking merely of textual transmission within the narrative itself. But that goes beyond mere bad English (which the sentence already is, IMO) and into the realm of… something much worse. Children are dying from HIV/AIDS in Africa because of this sentence.
This one seems to fly in from the office of a certain MH, whom I am utterly convinced is up there as one of the most turgid and incomprensible (obscure) academics in her entire School, if not the Arts faculty at large. She also takes an Arts II PoMo course which probably explains much of it.