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The Textual Condition
McGann's 1991 Princeton landmark establishing that every text exists materially — that the linguistic and bibliographical codes together constitute meaning, and that neither can be extracted from the other without loss.
The Textual Condition (1991) is McGann's fullest theoretical statement on the material, social, and historical dimensions of textual production. The book argues that texts are not disembodied linguistic content awaiting material instantiation; they exist always and only as material objects — books, manuscripts, electronic files, screens — and the material form is part of the meaning. The linguistic code (what the words say) and the bibliographical code (how the text presents itself as object) operate together in the reader's experience and cannot be separated without loss. The book provides the theoretical foundation for understanding both historical textual production and, though McGann could not have anticipated it, the material specificity of AI-generated text.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book extended arguments McGann had been developing since A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983) into a general theory of textuality. Where the earlier book had focused on editorial practice, The Textual Condition addressed the broader question of what texts are and