# Five Disciplines and Their Questions

Literature I · Introduction to Literary Theory · https://tryals.app/learn/literature-i/five-disciplines-and-their-questions

## Dividing the Labour

"Literary studies" is not one activity. The UB syllabus names five, and they are genuinely different, different objects, different evidence, different criteria for being wrong.

| Discipline | Its question | Typical evidence |
|---|---|---|
| **Literary theory** | What is literature, how does it mean? | Concepts, arguments, other theories |
| **Literary criticism** | What is this particular work doing? | The text, closely read |
| **Literary history** | How did this come to be written, and what followed? | Chronology, context, influence |
| **Textual criticism** | What did the author actually write? | Manuscripts, editions, variants |
| **Comparative literature** | What happens across languages and traditions? | Two or more literatures at once |

Theory is **general and normative about method**; criticism is **particular and evaluative**; history is **diachronic**; textual criticism is **material**; comparative literature is defined by refusing the national frame that organises most departments.

### Textual criticism is the one that surprises people

Before you can interpret a line, someone has to establish it. For most works before 1800 the author's manuscript does not survive; what survives are copies of copies. The method built to deal with this, associated with **Karl Lachmann** in the nineteenth century, reconstructs the family tree of surviving witnesses:

1. **Recensio**: collect the witnesses and collate their variants.
2. Identify **shared errors**. A mistake two manuscripts make independently is unlikely; a shared error usually means shared descent.
3. Build the **stemma codicum**, the family tree, from those shared errors.
4. **Eliminatio codicum descriptorum**: discard any witness that is a copy of another surviving witness, because it can add nothing.
5. **Emendatio**: where the tree cannot decide, judge.

The consequence students find counter-intuitive: **the number of manuscripts agreeing on a reading is nearly irrelevant**. Fifty manuscripts descended from one bad copy are one witness, not fifty. What counts is the number of **independent branches**, so a stemma with three branches can be reconstructed from three well-chosen manuscripts, and the other forty add nothing but confirmation of their own branch.

### Where the disciplines rub

They are not sealed off. A theoretical commitment decides what a critic notices; an edition decides what a critic can read; comparative work exposes claims that only looked universal because they were made about one language. The friction is productive, and the failure mode is a discipline forgetting it is one of five, a critic who assumes the text is settled, or a theorist with no particular work in view.

> **Common pitfall:** treating theory and criticism as the same activity because both are "about interpretation". Theory is answerable to argument and can be refuted by a counter-example from any literature; criticism is answerable to a particular text and can be refuted by a passage from it. Mixing the standards produces theory that cannot be tested and criticism that cannot be checked.

## Practice questions

5 of this lesson's 11 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. If forty manuscripts agree on a reading and two disagree, the reading of the forty is established beyond doubt.

**Answer:** False

**Why:** **False**, and this is the central lesson of stemmatics. If the forty all descend from a single copy that introduced the error, they are one witness repeated forty times. Two manuscripts from an independent branch can outweigh them. Witnesses are weighed by descent, not counted.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/five-disciplines-and-their-questions/if-forty-manuscripts-agree-on-a-reading-and-two-disagree-the-reading

### 2. Literary theory and literary criticism are both concerned with interpretation, but they have distinct criteria for being wrong. What follows from this distinction when a scholar's claim is challenged?

A. A critical claim can only be tested by constructing a wider conceptual system
B. A critical claim must hold across multiple languages rather than a single text
C. A theoretical claim is refuted solely by pointing to errors in manuscript copy
D. A theoretical claim can be undermined by an anomaly in any literary tradition

**Answer:** D. A theoretical claim can be undermined by an anomaly in any literary tradition

**Why:** Confusing the two confuses their scopes: criticism answers strictly to a specific text, whereas theory makes general claims answerable to counter-examples anywhere. Textual errors refute editorial choices, not theoretical models.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/five-disciplines-and-their-questions/literary-theory-and-literary-criticism-are-both-concerned-with

### 3. Match each step of the Lachmannian method to what it does.

**Answer:**

- Recensio → Collect the witnesses and collate their variants
- Shared error → The evidence that two witnesses share an ancestor
- Stemma codicum → The reconstructed family tree of the witnesses
- Eliminatio → Discarding a copy of a surviving manuscript
- Emendatio → Judgement where the tree cannot decide

**Why:** The sequence is designed so that judgement comes last and does as little work as possible. Everything that can be settled mechanically, by descent, is settled first, and the editor's taste is confined to the cases where the tree genuinely underdetermines the text.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/five-disciplines-and-their-questions/match-each-step-of-the-lachmannian-method-to-what-it-does

### 4. Which are true of comparative literature as a discipline?

A. It refuses the national frame as the default unit
B. It studies only works written in more than one language
C. It tests whether categories built on one literature travel
D. It works with more than one literary tradition at once

**Answer:** A. It refuses the national frame as the default unit; C. It tests whether categories built on one literature travel; D. It works with more than one literary tradition at once

**Why:** Comparing traditions is a way of testing generality. A claim about "the novel" made entirely from French and English examples may or may not hold for the Chinese or Arabic novel, and the only way to find out is to look. The second option confuses the discipline with a property some individual texts happen to have.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/five-disciplines-and-their-questions/which-are-true-of-comparative-literature-as-a-discipline

### 5. Complete the description of the division of labour.

**Answer:** A claim in **textual criticism** is refuted by a manuscript; a claim in **criticism** is refuted by a passage from the work; a claim in **theory** is refuted by a counter-example from any literature at all; and a claim in **literary history** is refuted by a date.

**Why:** The exercise is worth doing because it shows the disciplines are separated by their **falsifiers**, not by their subject matter. All five are looking at the same shelf of books.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/literature-i/five-disciplines-and-their-questions/complete-the-description-of-the-division-of-labour