CONCEPT
The Social Text
McGann's reconception of the published text as the negotiated product of multiple agents — author, editor, publisher, compositor, censor — rather than the expression of a single originating consciousness.
The social text is McGann's alternative to the Romantic-intentionalist model of textual production. Where conventional theory treats the text as the expression of an author's intention and the editor's task as recovering that intention beneath the corruptions introduced by lesser agents, the social text framework treats every published text as the outcome of a collaborative process whose participants have different interests, different intentions, and different kinds of contribution. The meaning of the text is not reducible to any single agent's intention; it emerges from the interaction of all the agents involved. This framework dissolves the sharp distinction between authorial meaning and editorial corruption, and it provides the theoretical foundation for understanding AI-assisted texts without forcing them into the inadequate category of author-plus-tool.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework emerged from McGann's extended engagement with the editorial theory of W.W. Greg and Fredson Bowers — the dominant approach in twentieth-century Anglo-American textual scholarship, which held that the editor's task was to recover