Draft
... textual genetics or critique génétique , developed in the 1970s, became a major field of research in France, giving primacy to interpretation over editing ... rejects the traditional procedure of using other documents as a means of better understanding and appreciating the final text in favour of the view that every stage of composition of a work and its growth (notes, fragments, drafts, rejected passages, alternative versions, different editions or translations, etc) is an independent text and that the final text should be read in relation to its preceding material only in an intertextual way ...

Variant
... developed by a number of French practitioners of textual interpretation, textual genetics draws on notions of generalised writing [avoid Derrida] and hypertextuality, how texts are born, how they grow, how they end up in the form made available to the public. More broadly, a case can be made for seeing textual genetics as the analysis, commentary and critical interpretation of the way in which works of art come into being and are sustained as objects of interpretation ...

Comment I
... criticised for providing the stake to be driven into the corpse produced by the death of the author, and its application dismissed as amounting to little more than a meaningless game, largely because textual genetics has abandoned the traditional concern for why something has been written to highlight how it has been produced ...

Fragment
... writing writing and re-writing textual genetics ...

Comment II
... writing in the wake of textual genetics, is it possible to read in each particular of a composition an allegory of a text's unfolding genesis and to become aware of the mechanisms through which it engenders itself ...

Edition A
... writing in such a way that textual origins, influences and sources are not pushed below the polished surface but made to appear in full daylight as a genetic code ...

Rejected Passage
... the perfect point of departure for the textual geneticist could be the microgenetic question of marks made by the hand holding the pen to the paper taking the ink that becomes the manuscript, legible signs and illegible marks that indicate a series of personal codes or meanings, indicators for subsequent re-writing, the autobiography of the hand ...

Edition B
... writing with textual origins, influences and sources close to the surface, a genetic code that plays out the mechanisms which make writing possible and that writing makes possible ...

Diary Entry 28 March 2003
... genetic> it is not me that speaks but the hypertext machine that renders my designs <textual ...