Collaboration, circulation and the question of counterfeit in the Book Of Jessica

Suspicion is a requirement of professional reading. As one literary critic explains, reflecting on his own process of becoming a better reader: “I have learned to be more suspicious of narrative, not simply for the sake of suspicion, but because the complexity of what is a text deserves my suspicion. I must be suspicious to be a responsible reader of literature.” There is, then, a tension between a text’s designs to make readers believe and a critic’s need to hold that text at a distance, to question it and to remain suspicious. While this tension between text and reader can be considered the basis of any critical reading experience, it is heightened in the case of collaborative writing, the focus of this article.