摘要：The close study of literary texts has a long and illustrious history. But the popularity of textual analysis has waned in recent decades, just at the time that widely available electronic texts were making traditional analytic tools easier to apply and encouraging the development of innovative computer-assisted tools. Without claiming any simple causal relationship, I argue that the marginalization of textual analysis and other text-centered approaches owes something to the dominance of Chomskyan linguistics and the popularity of high theory. Certainly both an introspective, sentence-oriented, formalist linguistic approach and literary theories deeply influenced by ideas about the sign's instability and the tendency of texts to disintegrate under critical pressure minimize the importance of the text. Using examples from Noam Chomsky, Jerome McGann, and Stanley Fish, I argue for a return to the text, specifically the electronic, computable text, to see what corpora, text-analysis, statistical stylistics, and authorship attribution can reveal about meanings and style. The recent resurgence of interest in scholarly editions, corpora, text- analysis, stylistics, and authorship suggest that the electronic text may finally reach its full potential.
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