The influence of Jerome McGann one this series cannot be overstated. In his recent book, The Point is to Change It: Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present (2007), McGann continues his approach to "the history of poetry as an emergency of the present rather than as a legacy of the past." Following the warning spirit of Benjamin's Angelus Novus, McGann "calls us to rethink the aesthetics of criticism" following the imaginative forms for critical engagement modeled by the practice of language writing and experimental poetry of the last fifty years or so. But his critical-scholarly-pedagogical project has never been more important than in the last two decades, when "with the emergence of new media, and of digital culture in particular, the limitations of Enlightenment models of interpretation — the expository essay and monograph — have grown increasingly apparent." Moreover, contemporary forms of art and writing have never been more heavily edited — the wealth of information and ease of emendation and dispersion of cultural material has sprung a wide variety of works that can only be understood by traversing the tangled forensic materialities of their production, reproduction, and distribution.

McGann outlines his expanded editorial method in his 1983 classic A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism: "To determine the physical appearance of the critical text—indeed, to understand what is involved in such an apparently pedantic task—requires the operation of a complex structure of analysis which considers the history of the text in relation to the related histories of its production, reproduction, and reception. We are asked as well to distinguish clearly between a history of transmission and a history of production. Finally, these special historical studies must be imbedded in the broad cultural context which alone can explain and elucidate them." Further, this line of thinking is extended to the poetic text in The Textual Condition (1991): "Poets understand texts better than most information technologists. Poetical texts make a virtue of the necessity of textual noise by exploiting textual redundancy. The object of the poetical text is to thicken the medium as much as possible-literally, to put the resources of the medium on full display, to exhibit the processes of self-reflection and self-generation which texts set in motion, which they are."

Reading McGann, in text or via lecture, we are reminded, of his concluding statements in Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (2001): "The more sophisticated we are the more we normalize textual incommensurates. We have internalized an immensely complicated, many-leveled set of semiotic rules and signs, and we control the contradictions of actual textual circumstances by various normalizing operations. We can hope to expose these normalizations — which are themselves deformative acts — by opening the conversation here being proposed between analogue and digital readers. We begin by implementing what we think we know about the rules of bibliographic codes. The conversation should force us to see — finally, to imagine — what we don't know that we know about texts and textuality."