The TEI and the Study of Literature - Cummings

There are two main ideas which captured me from Cummings' article, The Text Encoding Initiative and the Study of Literature.  The first was that TEI and many of its controversies/questions seem to revolve around it being a scholarly primitive and just how primitive is should be.  I found it interesting that originally TEI was an initiative designed for the humanities, but as the years have progressed other disciplines have adopted it.  Cummings talks about the ways in which its original purpose - he uses the example of the TEI creating recommendations for the creation of the speech corpa - was taken by other disciplines and morphed so that it could be used for their purposes.  How much can a primitive tool be changed before it can no longer be used on a general basis because it is too specialized, and then therefore is no longer a primitive?

The second, and far more interesting, tidbit that caught my attention was how much TEI has become intertwined with literary criticism.  I took the literary criticism class last fall at UNE for my English major and quickly formed the opinion that wherever literature or even the faintest hint of prose may be found, literary criticism can be found lurking not far behind.  With TEI, it appears as though one of the huge topics of debate is the controversy over what makes up a text.  The TEI is based on the principle that literature is simply a text which is the combination of the same characters being used over and over again, simply in new ways.  To some literary critics, that is a shock-and-awe sin; to say a text is just a novel combination of characters eliminates the notion that Literature (with a capital L, mind you) is a specific category set aside for only a limited number of texts which mean some set of enlightened-thinking, human-condition encompassing standards.

TEI is confusing.  Cummings' article was no cake walk.  However, I was interested to make connections with his article and others that we have discussed in class so far, and with information I learned in previous classes.  I do look forward to seeing how the TEI will take form in our Walden project.