Writing Works: A Reaction to Michael Cahn’s Paper

Abstract

Taking up and expanding on the topic of Michael Cahn’s essay, this paper presents some observations on scientists’ editions of their collected works. These editions span the time from the second half of the eighteenth to the first half of the twentieth century. The main focus is on the practice of claiming literary and scientific authority by editing one’s collected works during one’s own lifetime. The paper begins by briefly describing the collected works of Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Charles Bonnet. The central section is devoted to Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s Natural History. Buffon’s work is taken as an example not only of editing, but of writing collected works. Buffon’s edited works had a long history of being expanded after their author’s death. At the end, two examples of early twentieth-century collections of research papers, by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns, are considered. The paper is a corollary to Michael Cahn’s thoughts on the cultural history of texts and asks for a more general reflection on the historical development of forms and genres of scientific writing.

Michael Cahn’s “Opera Omnia” describes a much-neglected aspect of the life of texts: “The Production of Cultural Authority.” Looking at the phenomenon of collected works, he deals with what he calls an “alphabet of significance [beyond] the letters,” a “cultural semantics” of editing. He shows that beyond the fiction of the “best text,” that is, the “critical edition,” which is itself the product of nineteenth-century philological historicism, the edition of the complete works of an author is embedded in historically varying cultural contexts that are much in need of critical examination in both their epistemological and social dimensions.

A German version of this paper appeared as (Rheinberger 2002). I thank Karine Chemla and Laura Otis for good advice.