The Essential Commentators  

Oleh:

Miller, Ronald

Jenis: Article from Books - E-Book
Dalam koleksi: Vygotsky in Perspective, page 316-366.
Topik: Thinking and Speech; Child Psychology; Scienti?c Legacy; High Term Mental Functions
Fulltext: The Essential Commentators.pdf (388.11KB)

Isi artikel

Vygotsky’s Collected Works have spawned a new publication whose title, The Essential Vygotsky, is as pretentious as it is preposterous. Fashioned on the six volumes of the Collected Works, this book contains six sections, with a few selected chapters from each of the six volumes included in each section and, not surprisingly, with each section being introduced with a commentary. No compelling reasons are provided for the selections that constitute the book or for why they are regarded as more essential than the chapters that are excluded. In some cases, the introductory commentaries are the same as those that appear in the Collected Works, with some minor changes, and in other cases, new voices are introduced. Given that much that others may consider as essential aspects of Vygotsky’s work is omitted from this book, its title seems to presume more than it can justify. But of greater concern is the fact that the very production of the book, with its unfortunate title, instantiates the very criticisms mentioned in some of the commentaries. Vygotsky’s earlier books translated into English had suffered distortions precisely because of interference and tampering with the texts by editors who decided to eliminate what they considered to be non-essential in Vygotsky’s writing. The Collected Works in their English translation were intended to put an end to this uncalled for and unnecessary meddling and to provide the interested reader with an opportunity to understand Vygotsky by reading his complete texts in all their complexity and with their blemishes and imperfections fully exposed. There is certainly a place for introductory texts that condense ideas and assist a reader to engage with dif?cult texts and we all make good use of them. In fact, without such help, for many of us original texts would probably remain impenetrable and beyond our grasp. But there is something distasteful, if not disrespectful, about disembowelling the Collected Works of an author and dishing them up in disjointed bits and pieces. It is dif?cult to resist the uncharitable conclusion that by shrinking the size of the pool, there is a perceived corresponding increase in the stature of the frogs, with the Essential Vygotsky providing the occasion for the consolidation of the commentators as essential.

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