Journal Article

REVIEWS

Johnson, J Cale

2013

Overview

Kramer was faced with a veritable deluge of more-or-less unreliable student exercises that happened to witness to the great bulk of Sumerian literature, while Jacobsen was dealing with the numerous manuscripts of a single chronographic text that was, in all likelihood, never part of the school curriculum. The most important innovations in Delnero's thinking between dissertation and book are twofold: the entire project has been reconceptualized as a case-study in Sumerian textual criticism; and the role of memorization, which is also the theme of a recent paper by Delnero (\"Memorization and the transmission of Sumerian literature\", Journal of Near Eastern Studies 71, 2012, 189-208), has taken centre-stage in Delnero's thinking on variation in Sumerian literature. The lack of a clear description of contamination (viz. horizontal transfer of a reading from one manuscript family to another, thus presupposing the existence of manuscript families, even if difficult to identify) is troubling because, as Timpanaro noted from the grave: \"... there are cases (many, as Pasquali noted) in which contamination and interpolation have acted so extensively and so early as to make it impossible to trace out any stemma at all (those cases in which Pasquali, referring only to contamination, speaks of as 'total pretraditional contamination')\" (Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann's Method (Chicago, 2005), p. 212, citing Pasquali, Storia della tradizione (Florence, 1934/1952), pp. 146-55, 177-80).

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Families & family life / Literary criticism / Literature / Memorization / Methods / Schools / Sumerian language / Textual criticism / Theme