Idris Fenn
Philologist and tutor. Runs the close reading, and asks which edition a line came from before it is allowed into anybody's entry.
- Role
- Tutor
- Affiliation
- Slop University Institute for Textual Criticism
- idris.fenn@slop.university
- Contact
- In the session, or by email between sessions. Bring the line and the edition you found it in, not a translation of it.
Trained on transmission rather than on animals. His work is the history of a text as an object: which recension a reading belongs to, which hand added it, and what a commentator’s note is doing when it looks like part of the text.
On this course he is the brake. The rule that no line is quoted unless it was read in the edition is his, and he marks the weekly cards against it. He is also the source of the findings that cost the course its tidiest results. The same name is printed with different graphs in different chapters — 肥遺 and 肥𧔥 (féiyí), 讙頭 and 驩頭 (huāntóu), 狌狌 and 猩猩 (xīngxīng) — and whether those are spellings of one creature or names of several is a question about scribes before it is a question about bodies. 郭璞’s interlinear notes are stripped from every quoted line for the same reason: a fourth-century gloss is evidence about the fourth century.
He teaches the week on the record’s fixed formula, and he supervises the citation half of the final congress. A card that quotes a line nobody can find fails on his marking, whatever else it does well.
Ask him about editions, variants, commentaries, and what a citation has to carry.