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Metaphilology

Jan M. Ziolkowski, Harvard University


The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship. By Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 93 $24.95.
Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern. By Seth
Lerer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 325. $52.50
(cloth); $22.50 (paper).

THE RETURN TO PHILOLOGY AND THE NOT-SO-NEW NEW PHILOLOGY

Philology can be strangely polarizing. Indeed, both of the books under


review manifest a simultaneous attraction and revulsion for philology and
its practitioners. Nor are Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Seth Lerer by any
means alone or unprecedented in their ambivalence toward philology. For
a term that carries the Greek root for love as its rst element, the word
has proved to be recurrently incendiary for centuries and even millennia,
periodically occasioning discomfort and even internecine strife between
literary scholars and linguists, literary historians and literary theorists, and
traditionalists or conservatives and innovators. Within the humanities in
colleges and universities, the love of logos would seem to lie at the heart
of a complex love-hate relationship.
But outside this one quadrant, or quadrangle, of society, the word holds
little or no meaning. The average person on the street, and perhaps even
in academic institutions, may well take philology as a mispronunciation
of falafel. To judge by my own conversations, when such individuals do
have any vague sense of the philological enterprise, they conceive of it as
embodying a dry-as-dust preoccupation with individual wordsa Wortphilologie put through the wringer to emerge as no more than simplistic
etymologizing.
Philology was not a buzzword during my own undergraduate and graduate years in the mid- and late 1970s. I heard the four syllables uttered in
classes only when a professor happened to touch upon the title of Martianus Capellas prosimetrum, The Marriage of Mercury and Philology. The
invisibility or inaudibility of philology did not result from a conspiracy of
silence so much as from broad trends that had diverted attention from
the various philologies (Germanic Philology, Romance Philology, Slavic
Journal of English and Germanic PhilologyApril
2005 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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Philology, Semitic Philology, Comparative Philology, and so forth) that had


held sway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that
had grown ever less articulate about their preconceptions and ultimate
purposes, let alone their theoretical presuppositions.
The 1950s and 1960s had seen New Criticism move to center stage
in literary studies in general. Also in the 1960s, the so-called Parry-Lord
theory of oral-formulaic composition (named after Milman Parry [1902
1935] and Albert Bates Lord [19121991]) had caused a hullabaloo in
medieval studies.1 At more or less the same time a major uproar, almost
forgotten today, took place in medieval literary criticism, especially in
the elds of Old and Middle English in the United States, over what was
called variously patristic exegesis, Neo-Augustinianism, or Robertsonianism (after D. W. Robertson, Jr. [19141992]).2 The semiotic system of
structuralism wafted in like a gentle breeze, and later the inuence of
Jacques Derrida (19302004) began to blow across the ocean, but the
gale of English translations and American disciples had not yet slapped
the Atlantic coastline with its full force.
But philology? Although degrees tagged explicitly in philology were
still being awarded, as they are granted even today, at a dwindling number
of institutions in elds such as Classics, and although dozens of professional publications (not the least of which would be the Journal of English
and Germanic Philology) continued to have philology embedded in their
titles, the word and concept were not being analyzed, debated, or even
much mentioned.
The renewal of philologys stock was prompted by the unlikeliest of
promoters, namely, Paul de Man (19191983). De Man, a professor at
Yale University, who inspired impassioned loyalty among many of his
protgs, was rst a key gure in the poststructuralist literary theory,
especially deconstructionism, that swept over departments of Comparative Literature and French in North America in the 1980s.3 Later, when
1. The best starting point for an understanding of the theory is Albert B. Lord, The Singer
of Tales, 2d ed., ed. Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
2000).
2. See D. W. Robertson, Jr., Historical Criticism, in English Institute Essays 1950, ed. A.
S. Downer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 331, repr. in D. W. Robertson,
Jr., Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 320; E. Talbot
Donaldson, Patristic Exegesis in the Criticism of Medieval Literature: The Opposition, in
Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 19581959,
ed. Dorothy Bethurum (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 126, repr. in E. Talbot Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), pp. 13453; and R. E.
Kaske, Patristic Exegesis in the Criticism of Medieval Literature: The Defense, in Critical
Approaches, ed. Bethurum, pp. 2760.
3. For a concise sketch and bibliography of works by and about de Man, see Cynthia Chase,
De Man, Paul, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden
and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 19497.

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his own anti-Semitic and collaborationist publications from World War II


garnered public attention in 1988, he posthumously elicited the charge by
antideconstructionists that the denial of intentionality and the emphasis
on instability of meaning were both ploys by their chief advocates to avoid
responsibility for nasty politics.4 At approximately the same time, a similar
reaction occurred as it became general, and controversial, knowledge
that Hans Robert Jauss (19211997) had served in the Waffen-SS during
the Second World War. In Jausss case, his wartime activities were seen as
forming part of the intellectual backdrop to his emphasis on the reception
of works rather than on their authors intentions. Eventually the miasma
enveloped Martin Heidegger (18891976) himself, as his commitment
to the National Socialist movement became indisputable.
So how did de Man, who, whatever other accusations he has endured,
has never been suspected of being a medievalist, become a founding
father of the New Philology? The explanation can be found in a single
short piece that hit the newsstands in the Times Literary Supplement on December 10, 1982, in a symposium entitled Professing Literature.5 This
brief commentary, entitled The Return to Philology, commences as a
rejoinder to a polemic by Walter Jackson Bate (19181999) that had been
disseminated in Harvard Magazine.6 Although de Mans essay sets forth a
number of points clearly, it turns out to be remarkably thin and blurry in
the light that it sheds on philology, and this vagueness is poignantly (or
pathetically) self-subversive, since at least once de Man professed to be a
philologist himself.7 In fact, to be philological, The Return to Philology
employs the word philology only three times, the word philological once, and
the word philologist twice. In the rst instance of philology, de Man would
appear almost to equate the term with grammar in the medieval trivium
of verbal arts (alongside rhetoric and dialectic), since he writes, the
teaching of literature . . . has justied itself as a humanistic and historical
discipline, allied to yet distinct from the descriptive sciences of philology
and rhetoric (p. 21).
4. The fullest exposition of the wartime activities of de Man can be found in David H.
Hirsch, The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Ausschwitz (Hanover, New Hampshire:
Brown Univ. Press, Published by Univ. Press of New England, 1991), especially pp. 6979
and 97117; of Jauss, pp. 14357; and of Heidegger, pp. 8096.
5. In Professing Literature: A Symposium of the Study of English, Times Literary Supplement 4158 (10 December 1982), pp. 135556, repr. in Resistance to Theory, Theory and History of Literature, 33 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 2126. I follow
the pagination of the reprint.
6. The Crisis in English Studies, Harvard Magazine, 85:12 (September-October 1982),
4653.
7. Stefano Rosso, An Interview with Paul de Man, in de Man, Resistance to Theory, p. 118:
I am a philologist and not a philosopher.

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Exactly what de Man wishes to signify in the one and only instance when
he deploys the adjective philological is elusive: attention to the philological
or rhetorical devices of language is not the same as aesthetic appreciation
(p. 25). In drawing this distinction de Man inadvertently misplaces the
adjectives philological and rhetorical. What he meant (if we may be permitted
to assume that he had a meaning and that it is our right to seek it) was
probably philological or rhetorical attention to the devices of language
is not the same as aesthetic appreciation.
When he next resorts to the noun philology, de Man equates it with
linguistics: But, in practice, the turn to theory occurred as a return to
philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the
meaning it produces (p. 24).8 De Mans two interjections of the noun
philologist only muddy the waters further. In speaking of Michel Foucault
(19261984), de Man maintains that his rst book has to do with the
referential relationship between language and reality, but it approaches
the question not in terms of philosophical speculation but, much more
pragmatically, as it appears in the methodological innovations of social
scientists and philologists. Here de Man is likely to be following a predominantly European custom of treating philology as a synonym for
linguistics. But three sentences later he says that in Foucault, Derrida,
Edmund Husserl (18591938), and Ferdinand de Saussure (18571913),
the accent falls on Nietzsche the philologist rather than on Nietzsche
the existential nihilist (p. 24). Given Friedrich Nietzsches (18441900)
own conicted outlook upon philology, and in view of the differences
among the four writers de Man instances and the absence of citations in
the passage, the risk would be high in speculating about what de Man
means by philology here.9
It would be intriguing to know who were the practitioners of the philology to which de Man wished professors and students of literature in the
1980s to return, since the only one he identied by name was Nietzsche.
But the name that counted most was de Mans own. Whatever he meant
8. On the relationship between the two, see Witold Manczak, The Object of Philology
and the Object of Linguistics, in Historical Linguistics and Philology, ed. Jacek Fisiak, Trends
in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs, 46 (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 26172;
Matti Rissanen, On the Happy Reunion of English Philology and Historical Linguistics,
in Historical Linguistics, ed. Fisiak, pp. 35369; and Mary Blockley, Philology, Linguistics:
Should You Leave?: 19881998, in Thirty Years More of the Years Work in Old English Studies,
ed. Joseph B. Trahern, Jr., Old English Newsletter Subsidia, 27 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute,
1999), pp. 314.
9. On Nietzsches views on philology, see William Arrowsmith, Nietzsche on Classics and
Classicists (Part II), Arion, 2 (1963), 527, and Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our
Educational Institutions: Homer and Classical Philology, trans. J. M. Kennedy (New York: Russell
& Russell, 1964).

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by philology, his advocacy of a return to it sufced in that period to make


the term chic and to put it into contention. De Man had already been in
the limelight in literary theory for a while; he had transcended being de
Man of the year to become, until his death, the don of the so-called Yale
Maa.10 But if he and his deconstructionist family were philologists,
what did that make the denizens of Language and Literature departments
who held degrees in philology or who published in philological journals?
Suddenly all those literary scholars who had labeled themselves as philologists plain and simple but had never made much of the fact found their
job descriptions being usurped by literary theorists who styled themselves
philologists not so plain and not so simple. The situation was electric.
My rst shock of this high voltage came in the 1980s in the two departments in which I was jointly appointed, namely, Classics and Comparative
Literature. Somewhat insouciantly, I performed the organizational equivalent of wetting my nger and inserting it in a socket where a 100ampere
fuse had gone by mounting a conference that took place in 1988 on the
topic What Is Philology? The event allowed me to form my thoughts
and also to explore systematicallyalbeit only preliminarilythe history
of understandings and tensions about philology. The day of dialogue led
to the publication of a small book in which, in a grand total of 78 pages,
a dozen scholars articulated their views on the meaning and signicance
of philology.11 As chance had it, the conference initiated a succession of
collaborative considerations of philology that had particular importance
in medieval studies.
Although the study of literature from the Middle Ages did not approach
being the locomotive of literary theory during the glamour days of the
late 1980s and early 1990s, sometimes it at least played the caboose and
beneted from the abundance. This short-lived phase, in which philology
(not normally known for being a very protable enterprise) enjoyed an
uncustomary vogue for a few years, could be designated the philo-dough
period. The train in which philology brought up the rear was temporarily
the gravy train.
In the Francophone world the surge began with the articles and book
chapters by Bernard Cerquiglini in the early 1980s that eventuated in his
book, published in French in 1989 and translated in English in 1999 as
10. This appellation, which was heard in the 1980s and early 1990s, probably was formulated in response to the publication of Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum,
1979), which counted among its contributors not only Jacques Derrida but also four professors who were at the time all based at Yale University, namely, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man,
Geoffrey H. Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller.
11. Jan M. Ziolkowski, ed., What is Philology? Comparative Literature Studies, 27:1 (1990),
reprinted as On Philology (University Park: Penn State Press, 1990).

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In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology.12 In the Anglophone


world both advocacy and rejection of the movement took place mainly
in group efforts. First came a Speculum special issue on New Philology,
edited by Stephen G. Nichols, in 1990.13 Then there followed in 1991
a collective volume, edited by Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and
Stephen G. Nichols, entitled The New Medievalism, which left unresolved
the conundrum of what New Philology represented but which created
another, even more capacious New approach in the guise of the New
Medievalism.14 In supposed contradistinction to Old Philology ( just plain
old philology), New Philology zeroed in not on the stability of printed
editions that presented the collations of authoritative modern editors but,
rather, on the moving targets (the catchwords are mouvance and variance)
of readings in medieval manuscripts.
New Philology was not greeted with universal enthusiasm, even in the
English-speaking world. Many objections were raised to the very name.
Concerns were voiced in essays by divers hands in the 1994 volume on
The Future of the Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s, edited by William D. Paden, and to a lesser extent in the similarly entitled The Past and
Future of Medieval Studies, edited by John Van Engen, that came into print
in the same year.15 Outside North America the doubts were expressed
more sharply and vociferously, with the particulars varying from eld to
eld, but being especially pronounced among scholars of Old French and
medieval German. Just by way of example, I cite the collection of essays
edited by Keith Busby in 1993 under the title Towards a Synthesis? Essays
on the New Philology.16 Closer to my own specialization in Medieval Latin
12. Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. Betsy
Wing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), from the French original, loge de la variante.
Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989). Cerquiglini had broached the topic of the
1989 book in La parole mdivale: discours, syntaxe, texte (Paris: Minuit, 1981), pp. 11623,
and later he examined similar topics in Le roman de lorthographe: au paradis des mots, avant
la faute: 11501694 (Paris: Hatier, 1996).
13. The New Philology, Speculum, 65 (1990). His own contribution, entitled Introduction. Philology in a Manuscript Culture, runs on pp. 110.
14. In this volume (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991) I would mention in
particular David F. Hult, Reading It Right: The Ideology of Text Editing, pp. 11330. A
capstone on the collaborative publications was formed by Medievalism and the Modernist Temper,
ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996).
15. In the volume edited by William D. Paden (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1994).
I would single out his own Scholars at a Perilous Ford, pp. 331, and Rupert T. Pickens,
The Future of Old French Studies in America: The Old Philology and the Crisis of the
New, pp. 5386. In the book assembled by Van Engen (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame,
1994), special note goes to Lee Patterson, The Return to Philology, pp. 23144, which
contains considerable analysis of de Mans Return to Philology.
16. Note in particular Donald Maddox, Philology, Philo-Logos, Philo-logica, or Philologicon? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 5969.

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studies, Jrgen Stohlmann posed the question What does New Philology
offer us?17 More recently, Richard J. Utz has appraised knowledgeably
both North American and German responses to New Philology, partly
by setting them within the contexts of the differing attitudes toward the
relationship between medieval studies and medievalism.18
Often the worries about the New Philology tied into disputes about editorial procedures that extended beyond medieval studies. Here the volume
published in 1997 by Martin-Dietrich Glegen and Franz Lebsanft, with
the title Alte und neue Philologie, is particularly pertinent,19 as is an essay by
Werner Schrder in reaction to New Philology and its German reex in
the conception (and publication project) of Modernes Mittelalter.20
Was what was ruminated and formulated by the self-proclaimed New
Philologists so new? R. Howard Bloch, whose essay in the Speculum issue
has been, because of vagaries in the reception history of New Philology, the
most harshly scrutinized, himself questioned the validity of the adjective
New in the phrase New Philology.21 We could snort Plus a change,
but such a grumpy reaction would not be entirely fair. Yet I do suspect
that the new was not only an intellectual move but also a marketing
ploy: Consumer products that are billed new and improved often gain
a renewed lease on life, even if they have not been changed so much.
This is not a stratagem to which to resort too often: Despite the acceleration and proliferation of different theories, or at least names for them,
the moment for New New Philology will probably not arrive during any
of our scholarly lifetimes. But rather than looking forward to a putative
17. Was bringt uns die Philologie nouvelle, in Philologie und Philosophie. Beitrge zur VII.
Internationalen Fachtagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Philosophischer Editionen (12.-14. Mrz 1997
Mnchen), ed. Hans Gerhard Senger (Tbingen: M. Niemeyer Verlag, 1998), pp. 7188.
18. Richard J. Utz, Resistance to the (New) Medievalism, in The Future of the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance: Problems, Trends, and Opportunities for Research, ed. Roger Dahood
(Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 15170.
19. Beiheft zu editio 8 (Tbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997). The volume contains
several major essays: Glegen and Lebsanfts own introduction, Von alter und neuer Philologie. Oder: Neuer Streit ber Prinzipien und Praxis der Textkritik, pp. 114; Philippe
Mnard, Rexions sur la nouvelle philologie, pp. 1733; Alberto Varvaro, La New
Philology nella prospettiva italiana, pp. 3542; Rdiger Schnell, Was ist neu an der New
Philology? Zum Diskussionsstand in der germanistischen Medivistik, pp. 6195; and
Dietmar Rieger, New Philology? Einige kritische Bemerkungen aus der Sicht eines Literaturwissenschaftlers, pp. 99103.
20. Werner Schrder, Die Neue Philologie und das Moderne Mittelalter, in Germanistik
in Jena. Jenaer Universittsreden 1 (1996), 3350, and Karl Stackmann, Neue Philologie?
in Modernes Mittelalter. Neue Bilder einer populren Epoche, ed. Joachim Heinzle (Frankfurt am
Main: Insel, 1994), pp. 398428
21. R. Howard Bloch, New Philology and Old French, Speculum, 65 (1990), 3858. For
criticisms of Bloch, see Rieger, New Philology? in Alte und neue Philologie, ed. Glegen and
Lebsanft, pp. 1068; Paden, Scholars at a Perilous Ford, pp. 1316; and Pickens, The
Future of Old French Studies, pp. 5455, 6569.

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future, let us look back to a real question about the past: Was the New in
New Philology justied?
The few years of the brouhaha over the New Philology and the New Medievalism witnessed the advent in medieval literary studies of movements
that had occurred long before, in literary studies of later periods. This
arrival brought with it an exaltation of the manuscript, the predominant
medium of textual transmission in the Middle Ages. The manuscript was
an important constituent in what Nichols called the postmodern return
to the origins of medieval studies. Nichols used the phrase manuscript
matrix to convey a place of radical contingencies: of chronology, of
anachronism, of conicting subjects, of representation.22 The phrase
manuscript matrix bears a resemblance to intertext, in that it allows
for the interplay of different textual codes, but it gives a nod at least to the
particularities of the codex as an object distinct from the printed book.
Placing developments such as New Philology in a historical context
raises serious challenges, because the narrative of medieval literary studies
has begun to be drafted only comparatively recently.23 Whereas guides to
classical scholarship have not only existed for a long time but have even
grown in number recently,24 the corresponding work for medieval studies
has been undertaken only lately. Scholars of Old English have been tracing
the history of their eld, scholars of Medieval Latin theirs, and so forth,
but the bits of fabric have not been stitched together. For English speakers, Helen Damicos three volumes offer a much-appreciated assemblage
of material for future progress.25
To acquire a deeper sense of the genealogy of philology and the relationship of old and new philology within my own specialization of
Medieval Latin, I have had to hunt up facts about the careers of Romance
philologists, classicists, and Medieval Latinists. Writing introductions to
22. For a critique of this formulation, see Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval
Manuscripts and Their Readers (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), chapter 5,
especially pp. 2008.
23. On the history of the history of philology, see Pascale Hummel, Histoire de lhistoire
de la philologie. Etude dun genre pistmologique et bibliographique (Geneva: Droz, 2000).
24. See, for example, Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship 13001850 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1976); Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia, ed. Ward W. Briggs
Jr. and William M. Calder III (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990); and Pascale Hummel,
Philologus auctor. Le philologue et son oeuvre, Sapheneia: Beitrge zur Klassischen Philologie,
8 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003).
25. In the present context the most relevant of the three is Medieval Scholarship: Biographical
Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2, Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico,
Donald Fennema, and Karmen Lenz (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). The other
volumes vol. 1, History, ed. Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil (New York: Garland Publishing,
1995), and vol. 3, Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Damico, Fennema, and Lenz (New York:
Garland Publishing, 2000). A synthesis of a more idiosyncratic sort is presented by Norman
F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the
Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow, 1991).

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reprints or translations of books by Erich Auerbach (18921957), Domenico Comparetti (18351927), and Dag Norberg (19091996), and
researching an article on the place of Ernst Robert Curtius (18861956)
in Medieval Latin studies, enabled glimpses of philology in bygone times
that have helped me better to gauge the present.26 When I started teaching in 1981, I was profoundly unfamiliar with the history of scholarship
in medieval literary studies. More than a decade later, I remained ill-informed about much of that past, but I began at least to realize the scope
of my own ignorance.
So where is philology now, and how does it t with the philology of
yore? How much new philology is around, how much old philology, how
much philology tout court? Philology is no longer as divisive as was the
case ten or fteen years ago.27 Mainly, the lessening of tensions relates to
the breaking down of the articial barriers between close study of older
languages, texts, and manuscripts, and extensive command of literary
theory. The dissolution of boundaries seems all to the good, but the diminishment of anxiety over philology results partly from the less happy
circumstance that many branches of philology have withered. Here an
obvious fact merits mentioning belatedly: the rubric philology is applied
almost exclusively to the study of older literatures. Even if we could nd
moments when the methods of analysis being practiced were identical
between an examination of Beowulf, the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux,
or Wolframs Parzival on the one hand and Samuel Beckets Waiting for
Godot, Salman Rushdies Satanic Verses, or Toni Morrisons Beloved on
the other, the likelihood that the latter would be labeled as philology is
virtually nil.28
The Cold War, the passing of which seldom elicits laments, held together
26. Jan M. Ziolkowski, Foreword, in Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in
Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, Bollingen Series, 74 (repr. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1993), pp. ix-xxxix; The Making of Domenico Comparettis Vergil in the Middle
Ages, introduction to Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages (repr. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), pp. vii-xxxvii; An Introduction to Dag Norbergs Introduction, in
Dag Norberg, An Introduction to the Study of Medieval Latin Versication, trans. Grant. C. Roti
and Jacqueline Skubly, ed. Jan Ziolkowski (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. of America
Press, 2004); and Ernst Robert Curtius (18861956) and Medieval Latin Studies, The
Journal of Medieval Latin, 7 (1997), 14767.
27. For a graceful taking stock of the state of affairs seven years ago together with several
exemplications of philology in practice, see Roberta Frank, The Unbearable Lightness
of Being a Philologist, JEGP, 96 (1997), 486513.
28. As the exceptions that prove the rule, note Carolivia Herron, Philology as Subversion: The Case of Afro-America, in On Philology, ed. Ziolkowski, pp. 6265, and Dieter
Mehl, New Philology und die Edition der Texte von D. H. Lawrence, in Zur berlieferung,
Kritik und Edition alter und neuerer Texte. Beitrge des Colloquiums zum 85. Geburtstag von Werner
Schrder am 12. und 13. Mrz 1999 in Mainz, ed. Kurt Grtner and Hans-Henrik Krummacher,
Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur: Abhandlungen der Geistes- und sozialwissenschaftliche Klasse 2000, 2 (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur,
2000), pp. 26172.

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a system that inadvertently beneted medievalists, who engage with a wide


spectrum of languages. It guaranteed a level of attention to European
languages, with border languages such as German and Modern Greek
receiving funding that trickled down to the reexes of those languages in
the Middle Ages. What has happened since the fall of the Berlin Wall few
of us in the humanities seemed to predictbut we were in good company,
since no one even in the prognostic elds of politics or economics seems
to have seen it coming either. Although Germany has grown into an even
larger and more important country than it was before the Berlin Wall
came down, the growth of English as a global language and the shifting
of attention in the United States from Europe to other regions with more
threatening political problems have caused enrollments in German language study to plummet. In both desperation and reection of a change
in the prevailing interests among younger professors in the eld, the old
philological presumption that Germanistik should encompass study of
history of the language and of older Germanic dialects has yielded to an
emphasis on cultural studies.29 Although medieval German could (and
should, for what my opinion is worth) have a niche in German Studies,
departments are tempted to make appointments in lm and to leave
retiring medievalists unreplaced.
In Romance languages the situation is even more complex. Enrollments
in Spanish have grown, while those in Italian have held steady and those in
French have dropped. I have the impression that often the French wings
of Romance languages are under pressure to relinquish teaching positions
to their Spanish counterparts, which sometimes have pent-up resentments
and maybe desire to achieve payback after having been treated as poor
relations for many decades. Even when there is not an impetus to downsize
the French sections, the dynamics within French departments seem not
at all unlike those ascendant within German departments, where given a
choice between making new appointments in lm studies, feminism, ethnic
and minority studies, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, gender studies,
or queer theory, many colleagues who work on nineteenth- or twentiethcentury literature show no compunction in jettisoning coverage of the
rst third or more of the literary and cultural history they are supposed to
profess. The same may hold true even in departments of English, where
29. On the situation of medieval German literature, see Elaine C. Tennant, Old Philology,
New Historicism, and the Study of German Literature, in Lesarten: Mthodologies nouvelles
et textes anciens, ed. Alexander Schwarz (Bern: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 15377, and, much
more recently, Medieval German Voices in the 21st Century: The Paradigmatic Function of Medieval
German Studies for German Studies. A Collection of Essays, ed. Albrecht Classen, Internationale
Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 46 (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2000), especially in his introduction, pp. 742.

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the numbers of positions at stake run much higher as English departments


move more and more toward being the locus for the teaching of any and
all literatures in translation. My colleague Dan Donoghue, in an article
that delivers many pointed observations about different understandings of
philology, comments that for a variety of reasons philologists have come
to feel more marginalized within English departments, making them more
likely to turn elsewhere for collegiality.30 I suspect that the reasons for
this sense of marginalization differ little from what many Old French or
Old and Middle High German philologists experience.
Yet the clouds hanging over philology are pierced by not just small rays
but even great beams of hope. Medievalists are very adroit at joining together across their many departments to lean on other departments and
administrations and to orchestrate appointments that may not seem at
rst glance likely to be approved. Their concerted pressure helps to get
positions authorized and advertised. At the other end, many of the young
scholars who will determine the contours of all elds in the coming two
decades are genuinely eclectic in positive ways. They should be encouraged and required to seek out knowledge of languages, manuscripts, and
theories in the constellations that enable them to understand best the texts
and other materials with which they choose to work. Interdisciplinarity
is indispensable not only for intellectual growth and new ndings to be
achieved but even just for survival.
Not that interdisciplinarity lacks its problems: the person who negotiates between too many disciplines may end up having none and may
have no job either. The images of falling between chairs or of serving
too many masters may not have been inspired by any academic tragedy,
but they could have been. Both intellectual honesty and discovery lose if
we cannot defend our arguments without switching back and forth between elds and disciplines, leaving one whenever the going gets tough.
One danger posed by New Philology was that its exponents would frame
arguments based on the special nature of manuscripts whenever theory
failed them, or on theory when the manuscripts were not forthcoming.
Another was that they would fetishize manuscripts without actually spending very much time learning to decipher them and to collate the results
with the decipherments of other manuscripts. There has been a painful
irony that the modishness of manuscript culture has coincided with an
era in which it has become ever rarer for graduate students to acquire
30. Daniel Donoghue, Language Matters, in Reading Old English Texts, ed. Katherine
OBrien OKeeffe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 62. Seeing an endnote
number at the end of the sentence cited, I went in search of the documentation but found
none on this topicunless it is embedded ironically and implicitly in the title of the article
on Old English Stress!

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grounding in palaeography or editing, and ever harder for administrators


to comprehend the difculties entailed in the preparation of an edition
based on manuscripts.
For at least a couple of decades the secret weapon of medievalists has
been pedagogy. Those who teach fairy-tales, comic books, lms, advertising, detective stories, thrillers, and other such genres or media can
count on drawing undergraduates for whom reading anything, let alone
texts from a distant culture in difcult languages, is an arduous chore
associated with the classroom in particular, rather than life in general.
But medievalists are well versed in the art of ghting for spots in public
view. Whatever help we may garner sporadically from J. R. R. Tolkien,
C. S. Lewis, Umberto Eco, or even Harry Potter, on the whole we have
to rely upon our own promotion of medieval literature. In this ongoing
campaign manuscripts may serve a function, since the individuality and
the multiplicity of media represented in manuscripts can be enormously
appealing to students today.
The New Philology and whatever other approaches succeed it may have
a role too in these battles, so long as they do not lead to either of the basic
human errors that often vitiated older manifestations of philology. One
of these mistakes is to allow the learning of philology, no matter how old
or new, to become an impediment to the humane experience of reading
and making contact with the past that draws many students and general
readers to the Middle Ages. In this regard I can do no better than quote
words that E. K. Rand (18711945), himself no mean philologist, published some seventy years ago:
I prefer the Virgil that Dante lets me see rather than the object revealed
in the scholarly pages of Teuffel and Schanz. Having attained this degree
of audacity, I will go further still. I prefer the allegorized Virgil of Bernard
Silvester to the annotated Virgil of some modern scholars. Subjectum est homo.
Really that is not a bad reading of Virgil. Subjectum est philologia classica, or,
more specically, subjectum est imitatio Graecorum,these are aspects of Virgils
poetry that only a very highly philologized community can understand. The
mediaeval Virgil is nearer, after all, to the simple lover of poetry.31

The other error is to dupe oneself into believing that any single approach
or bundle of approaches can and will lead to a full statement of the truth
that renders all future speculation otiose. Here again I will quote a great
medievalist, in this instance Henri de Lubac (18961991): Les meilleurs philologues eux-mmes ont se prmunir contre lillusion de croire
quaprs eux tout est dit.32
31. E. K. Rand, The Mediaeval Vergil, Studi Medievali, n.s. 5 (1932), 44142.
32. Henri de Lubac, Exgse mdivale: Les quatre sens de lcriture, vol. 4 (part 2, vol. 2),
Thologie, 59 (Paris: Aubier, 1964), p. 244, n. 2.

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METAPHILOLOGY

Near the end of Hans Ulrich Gumbrechts The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship (2003), there greets the eye a paragraph with
cardinal facts about the author, which includes a reference to his more
than ve hundred publications, which have been translated into nineteen
languages. These numbers may be checked against the dust jacket, where
the count is markedly lower: His more than four hundred publications
have been translated into seventeen languages.
How could such a formidable leap of one hundred publications and two
languages have taken place between the submission of the gures for the
paratext on the cover and that of the biodata in the book itself? Part of the
answer lies in work habits. The rst prose in The Powers of Philology is the
acknowledgments, which conclude with the hope that the dedicatee will
read the pages of the book as if they were yet another postcard. Since
both descriptions of the author begin by identifying him as a professor
at Stanford, a professor at Montral, and a director of studies in Paris, it
is quite conceivable that the writing of this eighty-seven-page text took
place in a manner closely approximating the scrawling of cards to a family
member or friend. Then again, maybe it should be compared with the
kind of electronically produced running commentary to the world that
Gumbrecht characterizes as high-tech philology (p. 52). What remains
to be determined is how much his own book constitutes philology and
how much philo-blogging.
The acknowledgments open with an expression of thanks to Glenn
Most, the initial auctoritas. They end by invoking a dynamic duo to proffer additional support, when Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht describes himself
as an admirer and an occasional student of the great classicist Manfred
Fuhrmann since the early 1970s and a colleague of the great philologist
Karl Maurer since 1975. The gratitude to Most turns out not to be limited to warmth for intellectual exchange, since Gumbrechts friend (p. 4)
invited him to participate in ve colloquia on the ve basic philological
practices that were held at the University of Heidelberg. These ve colloquia were themselves published in volumes that constitute useful repertories for classicists as well as graduate students in classics proseminars,
as they are being exposed to basic concepts, methods, and resources in
classical philology.
Gumbrechts indebtedness to Most also extends to apparently having
been granted permission to reuse in slightly modied form contributions
to the series of ve colloquia that Most organized and published. The relationship of the present volume to those earlier ve published papers is
nowhere made explicit, although in a footnote (pp. 67 n. 9) Gumbrecht

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explains how a line in his text had given him the title for the earliest version of what has now become the chapter Identifying Fragments. How
many other versions intervened between the earliest one and the present
one he does not spell out. Then he indicates that The titles of my following four contributions to the proceedings of the Heidelberg colloquia
followed the same syntactical pattern. Finally he furnishes bibliography
relating to those contributions. Although various moments in the book
gave me an eerie sense of dj lu, I was not shrewd enough to gure out
what was going on. Since the author nowhere reveals that he lifted the
earlier essays almost verbatim into the present volume, I went foolishly
to the stacks to consult all ve of them.33
Why dwell on this matter? Although purists remain who object strongly
to the reuse of material from articles in books, such recycling is commonplace and bothers me not at a jot. But I gripe at not having the relationship made overt. Not only would it spare hapless future researchers
the bother of needlessly tracking down duplicates of materials they have
already consulted under the misimpression that they are different, but in
addition it would outt future scholars of scholars with valuable materials for studying Gumbrechts own intellectual evolution. Furthermore,
the statement Eating ones fragment! thus ends up having a double
meaning (p. 23) is completely bafing unless the reader recognizes it
to relate to the title of the Heidelberg paper. In what looks to have been
a hasty revision of the originals, Gumbrecht equipped the chapter with a
new name but failed to excise a now-incomprehensible internal reference
to the old title.34
Even modest revision would have helped to make The Powers of Philology
appeal more powerfully to readers in North America or still more broadly
to English-speaking readers. In Heidelberg an unglossed reference to
the Conservative Revolution (p. 11) makes perfect sense, but outside
Germany the phrase requires at least passing explication; in the United
States it sounds like an aside about the Republican Party or the politics of
33. To save future readers the same blunder, let me signal the following correspondences:
with light retouching, chapter 1 Identifying Fragments, pp. 923 = Eat Your Fragment!
About Imagination and the Restitution of Texts; Chapter 2 Editing Texts, pp. 2440 =
Play Your Roles Tactfully! About the Pragmatics of Text-Editing, the Desire for Identication, and the Resistance to Theory; Chapter 3 Writing Commentaries, pp. 4153 = Fill
up Your Margins! About Commentary and Copia; Chapter 4 Historicizing Things, pp.
5467 = Take a Step BackAnd Turn Away from Death! On the Moves of Historicization;
and chapter 5 Teaching, pp. 6887 = Live Your ExperienceAnd Be Untimely! What
Classical Philology as a Profession Could (Have) Become.
34. Another irritation, this one pertaining to the prospective rather than retrospective,
is when Gumbrecht, using two different titles in the space of two pages (The Production of
Presence on p. 6 and The Powers of Presence on p. 7), refers to a book of his that was forthcoming.

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talk radio. Although it may be sad to say, to declare that the latest edition
of the Brockhaus denes legal commentary as a specic type of interpretation (p. 49) without a bibliographic citation will leave at a loss those not
familiar with the names of foreign dictionaries, not even with Germanys
equivalent to Websters. A related problem occurs when Gumbrecht states,
preposterously, that no dictionary denition of the word commentary ever
fails to mention that running commentaries constitute the norm; the
footnote to substantiate this generalization points to one German dictionary of literary scholarship as a random example.35 The issue of audience
comes most assertively to the fore in the chapter on teaching, in which
the only details relate to the situation of higher education in Germany.
(Gumbrecht does glance at the American academic debates, which he
leaves unspecied except in reference to their higher degree of navet
[p. 69].) The German discussion interests me personally, but it makes me
suspect that the book will play better with a university audience there than
here.
As a medievalist who aspires occasionally to ply the trade of philology, I
would say that at least three of the ve pursuits identied by Gumbrecht
in his ve chapter titles accord well with my own presuppositions about
the basic constituents of the discipline. Philology is associated with editing
texts and writing commentaries, and many philologists have teaching as
both a vocation and an avocation. Identifying Fragments may be of less
account for medievalists than for many classicists, although the process
of identication still looms large in our work.36 Furthermore, juxtaposing
texts of the past to their own and our own historical contexts is a familiar
function, if that is what is meant by Historicizing Things.
Gumbrechts prose leaves much to be desired. Among the words and
expressions that left me either scratching or shaking my head are (and
this is a sampling, rather than a full listing) a historical text curatorship
(p. 2), a sometimes naively antiacademic auratization of the imaginary
(p. 23), more immanentist forms of editing (p. 27), let alone that they
can avoid producing subject effects (p. 29), to complexify (p. 29), a
will to complexication (p. 62), psychoemancipatory (p. 85), and a
new and highly auratic concept of reading that humanists today increasingly use as a positive self-reference (p. 85). Both auratization and auratic
appear exceedingly rarely in English, outside translations from German,
and even there the words are such newcomers as not to have wended their
35. The onus is not on me to enumerate the dictionaries and handbooks that I have
consulted in which the word commentary is either omitted or else appears without a mention
of running commentaries.
36. Jacques Berlioz et al., Identier sources et citations, LAtelier du mdiviste, 1 (Turnhout:
Brepols, 1994).

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way into the Oxford English Dictionary. Although the basis for a denition of
auratization emerges casually (p. 63), those two sentences come belatedly
for anyone who tripped over the word forty pages earlier. Complexify and
complexication are found in the Oxford English Dictionary, although both
senses of the former are tagged as rare. Psychoemancipatory has eluded my
grasp; although I can surmise what it means, at rst it made my thoughts
turn to the release of a serial killer from prison or to the liberating effects
of watching Alfred Hitchcock lms.
It would take me too long to catalogue the sentences that left me in
perplexity, but here are a couple of examples. First is a passage that offers the most succinct denition of philology in the book (p. 3): [T]he
identication and restoration of texts from the pastthat is, philology as
understood in this bookestablishes a distance vis--vis the intellectual
space of hermeneutics and of interpretation as the textual practice that
hermeneutics informs. The discord between the plural subject and the
singular verb warrants noting, but what stumps me is the rest. Could it
be reformulated as Philology, understood here as the identication and
restoration of texts from the past, distances itself from hermeneutics and
from interpretation? Then comes a sentence on p. 7: This coemergence
of imagination with the desire for presence is by no means random, for
imagination is a comparatively archaic faculty of mind, which implies that
it has a specic closeness to multiple functions of the human body. In
comparison with what is imagination an archaic faculty of mind? How we
can verify its archaism? Which bodily functions does Gumbrecht have in
mindor does he refrain from naming them because they are not t for
print? Possibly the sentence quoted is explained in a paragraph on pp.
2021, which covers some of the same terrain, but to be honest, I could
not follow it either. On several occasions I found myself unable to parse
the prose of this book successfully, owing partly to its syntax and partly
to its sometimes needlessly abstract vocabulary. A case in point would be
the key passage on p. 33 that aims to differentiate between literary and
philological reading: In the sense of unredeemedand semantically
unredeemabletextual material launching a reection on the texts formal properties, literary reading and philological reading have something
more specic in common than the automatic production of author and
reader roles.
Beyond being sporadically impenetrable in style, the book runs long on
assertion and short on documentation (with the exception of references
to Gumbrechts own publications, such as the small catalogue that is repeated on pp. 24 n. 1 and 56 n. 2). In this connection it makes frequent
recourse to straw men, without even going to the trouble of identifying
them. Take for instance the paragraph that begins on p. 26 and runs to
p. 27:

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Nonetheless, some philological schools more rigorous than Menndez


Pidals have always postulated that editing should be independent of the
editors roles or intentions (some philologists have even wanted to exclude
the authors intention as a point of reference, although, on the other hand,
the role of subjective decisions and even of subjective taste has been a topic
in philological discussions since the age of classical antiquity). By trying to
prove that philological decisions can be made within the parameters of a
strictly textual logic, they have come close to a practice that Paul de Man
has described and canonized as theoretical readingeven though knowing about this proximity would have shocked some philologists more than
it might have shocked de Man.

From rhetorical and logical perspectives, this passage fascinates me. Footnoted only with reference to de Man, it inculpates without any amplication some philological schools, philological discussions, some philologists (twice),
and an indeterminate they. Gumbrecht returns to philological schools later
(p. 37) but is no more forthcoming about their location or membership.
(Possible locations, all of them German universities, with one Belgian
addition, are given much later [p. 54].) Does overcoming the resistance
to theory necessitate developing a phobia about basic scholarship? The
manner in which the paragraph ends is telling. Having opened up a can
of worms, Gumbrecht dumps it on the ground and walks away, at least
temporarily (p. 27): As no easy solution seems to be in sight, I will return to this question later on. Later he tacks back to de Man: Given his
distance vis--vis pragmatics and speech-act theory, on which basis would
de Man have resolved philological problems? (p. 35). I am not clear that
Gumbrecht returns to the rest of the philologyall those wriggly specics
that I called worms a moment ago.
The Powers of Philology contained many observations that seized my imagination, but more often than not I could not test their validity for the simple
reason that the books author refrained from providing any details. For
example, the discussion of the neophilological editing style and the
qualication of New Philology as occupying a place within text editing
like a guild within a craft (p. 38) left me eager for a pointer or two about
the editions Gumbrecht had in mind. So far as I have been able to judge,
the New Philology was much more productive of talk about editing than
of editions themselves. Whether that impression holds true or not, I need
to be directed to a specic manifestation of the neophilological editing
style.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht inaugurates his book with an anecdote about
his mother, who apparently would refer to elementary-school teachers by
calling them the German equivalent of philologists (p. 1). This usage,
which Gumbrecht cannot explain, enables him to make the transition to
remarking that he nds his mothers habit no more eccentric than when
some of [his] most competent American colleagues (p. 1) describe

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Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer (18871960), and Erich Auerbach as


philologists. But are those colleagues so bizarre in their nomenclature?
Gumbrecht is right that none of the three made a mark as an editor
(although Curtius did produce an edition as his dissertation37) and that
none engaged in such traditionally philological craftwork as writing a
full commentary (what Gumbrecht calls oddly on p. 2 and elsewhere
a historical commentary), but all three of them regarded themselves
as philologists, not necessarily wholly but at least partially. Thus Curtius
in his best-known book avowed his reliance on the scientic method
which is the foundation of all historical investigation: philology, stated
that The accidental truths of fact can only be established by philology,
and declared further that He who would study European literature has
an easier task than Bergsons philosopher. He has only to familiarize
himself with the methods and subjects of classical, medieval Latin, and
modern philology.38 In the introduction to his Essays in Historical Semantics, Spitzer claims to have worked in the belief that English and German as well as Romance Philology should be brought back to the fold of
the civilitas romana of the Middle Ages.39 Auerbach opens his last book
(Literary Language and its Public, p. 5) with the sentence The situation of
Romance philology in Germany has always been unique.40 Apart from
the self-designations of the scholars in question, we have to contend with
the problematic vocabulary of English, where the term Romanist (which
Gumbrecht elsewhere uses to describe these men professionally) would
give rise to endless confusions.41 In any case, in the face of Gumbrechts
reservations about the use Americans have made of the appellation philologist, it is not entirely consistent that he should himself characterize (p. 24)
Ramn Menndez Pidal (18691968) as a Hispanic philologist (which is
a potentially ambiguous phrase, especially in American English).
One word that does not occur with any regularity in the oeuvres of Curtius, Spitzer, and Auerbach is power. Gumbrecht confesses that originally he
intended to entitle his book The Poetics of Philology, but that eventually he
37. Li Quatre Livre des Reis: Die Bcher Samuelis und der Knige in einer franzsischen Bearbeitung des 12. Jahrhunderts, nach der ltesten Handschrift unter Benutzung der neu aufgefundenen
Handschriften, ed. Ernst Robert Curtius, Gesellschaft fr romanische Literatur, 26 (Dresden:
Gedruckt fr die Gesellschaft fr romanische Literatur, 1911).
38. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen
Series, 36 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), pp. x, x, and 14, respectively.
39. Spitzer, Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1947), p. 7.
40. In the essay that he published in 1953 in response to reviews of Mimesis, Auerbach
placed himself in the lineage of philology that ran from Hegel until the Second World War.
For an English translation of the essay, see Erich Auerbach, Epilegomena to Mimesis, trans.
Jan M. Ziolkowski, in Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 55974.
41. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Vom Leben und Sterben der groen Romanisten: Carl Vossler, Ernst
Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Werner Krauss (Munich: Hanser, 2002).

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decided to give it the title The Powers of Philology. By power he has in mind
not the notion of Michel Foucault but, rather, the potential of occupying
or blocking spaces with bodies (p. 5). He expatiates upon this thought
by specifying that this kind of power does not necessarily entail violence
but that it must always be based on physical superiorityand that it is
therefore inevitably heteronomous in relation to whatever can be regarded
to be a structural feature or a content of the human mind (p. 6). Not all
of this reasoning makes sense to me, and even less of it convinces me, but
Gumbrecht left me with the impression that his dream philologist would
bear more of a resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime as a
bodybuilder than to any of the philologists who are named in this book.
Maybe we do not need to go so far as to visualize Curtius on steroids, but
Gumbrechts fantasy Philologe would seem to share likenesses with the
bermensch of the arch-antiphilologist, Nietzsche.
Those practicing philologists who are drawn to this book by its title may
nd themselves impatient, since its disquisition is seldom cluttered with
signs that its author examined enough examples of their work closely
to be qualied to make pronouncements on the topic of philology. It
is disconcerting to peruse a chapter on editing texts in which de Man
elicits considerably more space than Menndez Pidal, the one and only
editor who is mentioned by name along with any of his editions. (There
is a huge irony in the amount of energy that Gumbrecht expends upon
endeavoring to determine on which basis would de Man have resolved
philological problems? [p. 35]. Apparently the intentional fallacy does
not apply when the auctores of literary theory are themselves under examination.) It is as if not only editions were irrelevant to the consideration
but also the very substantial body of signicant books about editing and
textual scholarship that has grown up over the past quarter century.42 Karl
Lachmann (17931851) does wend his way into the index of this book,
but only once (p. 91), by dint of having emerged a single time adjectivally
in the text (p. 38); far from occupying the foreground of Gumbrechts
thoughts, he and other editors are barely (or not even) shadows against
the backdrop.
Although Gumbrecht tried his hand at editing and commenting in work
on Juan Ruiz and Marie de France early in his career (1972 and 1973,
respectively), his appetites in reading and writing run nowadays in entirely
different directions, as he mentions when he turns (p. 31) to the credo
that certain texts are capable of speaking to humankind in general
42. For a taste of this scholarship, see Wolfgang Maaz, Die editorische Macht der Philologie. Eine Momentaufnahme, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch, 39 (2004), 113117. Maazs review
article leads to much bibliography on this particular topic as well as on other aspects of current philology and metaphilology, especially with reference to Medieval Latin philology.

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and illustrates it by referring to those situations in which interpreters ask


what Jacques Derrida, Karl Marx, or Jesus Christ wanted to say to usas
if, while writing and speaking, they had kept us in mind. Just as the
chapter on editing texts is nearly devoid of reference to editions, the one
on commentary relies entirely on a single example of a commentary: I
cannot help associating the concept of commentary with a strong visual
memory of the sixteenth-century printed edition of Las Siete Partidas (p.
44, with a reprise on p. 46). Even this glancing allusion to a sixteenthcentury book looks like a sop, since once again Gumbrechts interests and
questions lie chronologically considerably forward:
Commentaries should be every deconstructors dreamand in praise of
both the deconstructive tradition and the discourse of commentary (with its
image of being the poor relative among the philological core exercises), we
can say that deconstruction has pushed certain principles of the discourse
of commentary to its possible limits. Jacques Derrida bases his critique . . .
(p. 49).

The two pages that follow made me feel trapped in a time warp, as if even
after all these years after the vogue of deconstructionism we would not be
allowed to escape from the de-gravitational pull of Derrida. But maybe
that attraction is greater among the literary theorists or cultural critics for
whom this book appears to be intended, rather than among those who
would subsume themselves under the heading of philologist.
The Powers of Philology is as unphilological a book as one about philology
could be. Probably it would be right to class its ambit and modus operandi
as metaphilology, although other possibilities would be paraphilology,
hypophilology, and pseudophilology. Viewed narrowly, the existence of
this book qua book could be explained as the intersection between two
circumstances, the rst being the invitations from Glenn Most to present
papers in the ve Heidelberg colloquia and the second being Gumbrechts
indefatigability in publishing and republishing.
Beyond the happenstance of the invitations and Gumbrechts prolic
scholarship and even more prolic journalism may lie a larger reality.
Whatever the causes, literature has slipped in cultural importance in comparison with other arts such as cinema and music, and the numbers of
majors in many of the humanities as opposed to the social sciences and
sciences have plummeted. As a consequence, some professors of languages
and literatures may well feel more marginalized, less respected, and more
insecure than they have in a long time. In the culture wars of the 1980s
and 1990s, theorists disparaged traditionalists and vice versa. As a result,
both critic and theorist (and perhaps professor more generally) lost much of
the luster they once had. Not everyone wants now to be a philologist, but
many have good reason to look yearningly at the term: Professors want

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to have a name for what they do that will be taken seriously. Like de Man,
if they cannot pass muster as philosophers, they may think of themselves
as philologists.
Anything that requires explanation to be understood (and so much
academic prose now tumbles into that category, perhaps for similar reasons) must be taken seriously. Consequently, the philologist may have
come back into respectability, having a name that sounds impressive and
handling tasks that may be a trie dreary or embarrassing but that cannot
be carried out without expertise and that fulll functions only an expert
minority in society is needed or expected to perform. Thus a philologist
ends up looking like, perhaps, a proctologist (its dirty work, but people
with Doctor as their title are accorded special respect and sometimes
earn handsome salaries), and erstwhile misophilologists metamorphose
into philophilologists.

SCRIBBLE ERRORS

In Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern
(2002) Seth Lerer investigates how and why the professionalization of
literary study and the dening of error as a central concern of scholarship coincided. He sees the two as having intersected particularly in the
realms of rhetoric and philology. At the same time, he argues that the sense
of wandering that is embedded in the Latin error comes into play: The
professionalization of the scholar, and, in turn, the pose of the vernacular
rhetorician and philologist, was a means by which migrs, exiles, dissenters, and the social estranged gained private worth and public legitimacy
(p. 2). As such, he intends, or rather, this book hopes (p. 2), to shed
light on academic culture and university disciplines.
In the rst chapter Lerer demonstrates that in the humanism of Renaissance England scholars came to make erring and the correction of
error, as evidenced in their rhetoric about errors and editorship, a central
determinant of their self-identities. In its treatment of the thinking in
and behind errata sheets, this chapter bears comparison with Anthony
Graftons book on footnotes.43
In the second chapter Lerer trains his sights on Old English studies.
The rst of his three targets is George Hickess (16421715) Thesaurus
(17031705), which he regards as the rst modern work of Anglo-Saxon
scholarship. Then he takes aim at J. R. R. Tolkiens (18921973) writ43. Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1997).

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ings as an Anglo-Saxonist. Finally he draws a bead on Seamus Heaneys


(1939) translation of Beowulf (2000). His marksmanship leads Lerer to
conclude that the answer for Old English is neither philology nor theory
but rather a return to the poetry itself (p. 101).
The third chapter is devoted initially to the ctional gure of Casaubon in George Eliots (18191880) Middlemarch (18711872, a book of
errors, p. 129), whom Lerer juxtaposes with the real-life personage of
James A. H. Murray (18371915), editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
From Victorian scholars, the transition is made in the fourth chapter to
American philology, which Lerer sees as overlapping considerably with
rhetoric. Both American philology and American rhetoric Lerer views as
having been characteristically ardent in their commitment to a memory
or a mission (p. 4).
The basis for the move to the fth chapter was a little harder for me to
see. Identication of the memory or mission in the fourth chapter causes
Lerer to state that his vision of American rhetorical philology thus centers on estrangements: word and meaning, scholar and home, past and
present (p. 4). The fourth chapter seems to hold together internally,
but strain shows in the shift from a general argument that American
philology is (or was) a fundamentally rhetorical enterprise to the specic
contention that American philology and rhetoric preoccupy themselves
with estrangement and displacement: with the separation of words from
things, with the uidity of meanings, with the pursuit of political argument
through scholarly inquiry (p. 176). The discovery that nineteenth-century
American philology and rhetoric had the same main concerns as literary
theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s is not unexpected but may not
convince all readers.
The cynosure in the fth chapter is Erich Auerbach, embodiment of the
migr intellectual. In situating Auerbach, Lerer broadens the compass
of erring to include not just being wrong but also its original etymological sense of wandering. Lerer relates the themes of wandering and exile
within the texts and interpretations of Auerbachs renowned Mimesis to
its authors own life and identity as a transplanted philologist. The core
of this chapter will look familiar to those who have read Lerers essays on
Auerbach that were published in 1996, in Nichols and Blochs Medievalism
and the Modernist Temper, pp. 30833, and in the volume on Auerbach he
edited himself.44
From Auerbach, Lerer turns in his epilogue to the errings of other
exiles, migrs, and dissenters in universities, with particular attention to
44. Lerer, Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 110 and 7891.

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their roles in the study of philology, rhetoric, literary criticism, and literary theory. The showpiece in this segment is a reading of the science ction lm Forbidden Planet. Lerers culminating argument is that estranged
scholars, by distancing themselves from society and retreating into ivory
towers, validated their private worth and legitimated their identities as
professionalsas professors.
Error and the Academic Self has many appealing qualities, one of which is
the gentle irony and even self-denigration its author sometimes evinces
on the subject of scholarly slips. In the face of such humor it may seem
churlish to nd fault, but as Lerer himself has shown, that activity belongs
to both the otium and the negotium that dene the scholar. Scholars xate
on error because striving to avoid it, to identify it, and to correct it is how
they develop trust and build knowledge. However often one may hear
the statement I would be happy to be proven wrong, in my experience
most people do not like to be proven wrong. They develop strategies for
coping with their own errors, and recent decades have seen innovations
in such strategies. The opening paragraph of the introduction to Error
and the Academic Self is a case in point (p. 1):
I do not think I have ever published anything that did not have an error in it.
Typos have crept in and escaped proofreading. Miscitations and mistranslations have refused correction. Facts and judgments have, at times, seemed
almost willfully in opposition to empirical evidence or received opinion. It is
the duty of readers, so it seems, to catch such errors. Referees for publishers
and, after them, book reviewers often begin well and well-meaningly. But
praise soon shatters into pedantry, and reports and reviews will often end
with catalogues of broken lines and phrases.

Lerer begins in the rst person, which makes sense, since he is the author, the cover of the book sports his name, and (as he points out on the
same page) his publications and their reception affect annual decanal
salary reviews. But simultaneously he lives in a post-poststructuralist age:
the author has been dead since 1968.45 That R.I.P. allows Lerer to segue
into presenting his own book as a text with a life of its own, and any of its
shortcomings qualify as autonomous creatures with lives of their own: The
45. Roland Barthes (19151980), La mort de lauteur (1968), trans. The Death of
the Author, in Barthes, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1977). Since 1977 the English version of the essay has been often reprinted and
otherwise circulated elsewhere. The essay by Barthes has become commonly confused with
the related one by Michel Foucault, Quest-ce quun auteur? Bulletin de la Socit Franaise
de Philosophie, 64 (1969), 73104, which has been translated as What is an Author? in
The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinov (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 10120. The
problematization of the author as a concept by Barthes and his successors is studied in Sen
Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and
Derrida, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1998).

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typos move on their own, the miscitations and mistranslations are refractory, the facts and judgments are perversebut they behave in these ways
of their own volition. Lerers closing trope is to brand those who respond
favorably to his writings are well meaning, so long as they praise, whereas
those who point out aws are pedants.
Beyond the self-centered desire to be right, the related struggles to avoid
errors and to locate them are scholarly courtesies. The humanities are
not the sciences, in that we are not performing experiments that must be
reproducible; but nonetheless much of our writing continues to rely upon
materials produced by others that we must reference at the appropriate
instances so that our readers may verify for themselves what we have seen
and on what basis we say what we do.
Lerers book presents enough errors of commission and omission to
engender uneasiness about the solidity of the foundation for some of his
most arresting points. An early instance of sweeping generalizations on
the basis of imsy evidence involves taking the appearance of an actor in
the science ction lm Forbidden Planet as a caricature of the European
philologist. The features Lerer isolates as typifying the philologist (p. 4:
dark, brooding, goateed) strike me as being far from universal (even
Universal Studios), and over the years I, too, have lighted upon dozens if
not hundreds of photographs of different European philologists on the
frontispieces of Festschriften and elsewhere (p. 270). True, Lerer reverts
to his excogitations on facial hair later (pp. 27071). First he compares
the description of the character with the appearance of Leo Spitzer, Erich
Auerbach, and Ernst Robert Curtius, while not conrming whether any of
the three ever wore a goatee during their time in America (the second and
third did not, if my memories of their clean-shaven demeanors is correct,
but I have not yet done a stubble check on any pictures of the rst) and
not pointing out that the third was not Jewish (since Jewishness gures
in the larger argument that unfolds). The documentation boils down to
Lerers library work, his own reporting of which fails to reassure: I search
the library and nd, almost at random, a clutch of illustrated Festschriften
(p. 270). There is no point in asking what almost at random means, or
how many likenesses of smooth-faced philologists failed to pass muster.
What remains is a clutch of only three, to wit, Wilhelm Streitberg in 1924,
Eduard Sievers in 1925, and Albert Debrunner in 1954. Was any of the
three a Jew? Did any of the three immigrate to the United States? Did the
screenplay writer or writers of Forbidden Planet form their image of
the philologist from seeing similar frontispieces, or is there real evidence
that many migr philologists in the New World actually sported goatees?
Is this any way to construct an argument?
The last alleged symptom of the philologist that Lerer isolates is not even

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in the movie itself but, rather, in its novelization; namely, the word Oriental (p. 4). Even without the insights that Edward W. Saids (19352003)
Orientalism has made pandemic since its publication in 1978, I would like
to see details to underpin the view that in Hollywood or anywhere an instant equation was drawn between the Oriental and the European. True,
much later in the book (p. 270) Lerer reveals that by European he really
means Jewish: But I cannot help seeing behind that word Oriental, once
again, the code word of Jewishness that stretches back to Heinrich Heines
formulation. In my opinion, there must be place for intuition in literary
interpretation; but how much of an argument can rest on idiosyncratic
free-association? How do we know where we are or where we are going if
East means West?
The place of Jewishness in the argument of the book as a whole is somewhat mystifying. Lerer goes out of his way to put on record (p. 4) that he
has been preoccupied for two decades with Jewish identity. The issue of
Jewish identity could be relevant in contextualizing Erich Auerbach, who
is the subject of the penultimate chapter and part of the epilogue in this
book, although I would stop far short of accusing Auerbach of caricaturing Leo Spitzer as a nightmare creature of the Jewish other, a predatory
monster, an invasive and invading id (p. 269). Yet the introduction leaves
the impression that Jewishness will be more in the foreground of the book
than it turns out to be: Welleks tale stands as a nodal point for much
of what concerns me in this book: the idea of the socially dened other,
what one might call the larger notion of the juif errant (p. 11). On this
basis it would seem reasonable to nd in the index the categories other,
wandering Jew (and incidentally, why ourish the French juif errant when
the English would do?), or at least Jew. But none of them appears there,
for the simple reason that none bulks large in most of the book.
Unsubstantiated generalizing about categories such as Oriental, European, and Jewish has led to troubles in the past. On the more mundane
level of scholarship, making sweeping claims without undergirding them
with evidence can be irksome, misleading, and confusing. The example
just cited is far from isolated. Take as another illustration the averral that
All its [rhetorics] textbooks and discussions, from the Gorgias, through
Aristotles Rhetoric, through the Rhetorica ad Herennium and the works of
Cicero, through the medieval artes and the Renaissance arts, begin with
histories of the eld (p. 8). This assertion seemed so noteworthy to me
that I resolved to conrm it by consulting a few sources. First I checked
two medieval artes, to wit, John of Garlands Parisiana poetria and Geoffrey
of Vinsaufs Poetria nova. Then I went to the rst late antique treatise, by
Fortunatianus, that is labeled an ars in Karl Halms Rhetores latini minores
(1863). None of the three begins with a history of the eld.

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Lerer is strong on demonstrating how from the mid-1980s through the


1990s conservative Old English scholars insisted in reviews on identifying
local errors and global misunderstandings in books that were attempts
at bringing Anglo-Saxon studies into line with literary theory, cultural studies, or the broad analyses of the contemporary academy (p. 56). What he
does not show is that attacks in the other direction went on and continue
to go on. He critiques the rhetoric of the conservatives without appearing
to realize that he engages in rhetorical sniping of his own. An example
would be his treatment (p. 250) of Alvin Kernan (1923). Lerer quotes
(p. 249) a reminiscence by Kernan about Auerbachs Yale years: Now
that he was at Yale he felt that he had to make use of the vast resources
of Sterling Library. Ironically, the result of riches was a dreary book on
rhetoric, read and used by few. On this passage Lerer comments:
I have no idea just what dreary book on rhetoric is on Kernans mind. Perhaps he is thinking of Literary Language and Its Public, the collection of essays
assembled in the 1950s and published posthumously in German in 1958,
though soon translated into English and, in fact, regarded as one of the most
important critical assessments of the literary culture of late antiquity.

If Lerer has no idea, then it should be impossible for him to proceed immediately to the speculation in his second sentence. An endnote (p. 313
n. 56) purveys publication information on Literary Language and adds:
The only other book published by Auerbach in his Yale years is Typologische
Motive in der mittelalterlichen Literatur (Cologne: Petrarca-Institut, 1953), a
work not really concerned with rhetoric and probably so arcane that even
Kernan did not know about it. The reference to Typologische Motive is a
red herring, as Lerers own last clause acknowledges with its backhanded
implication that Kernan would not have been aware of the publication.
Though in a bibliography of Auerbachs writings the title will be italicized,
Typologische Motive is not a book but a printed lecture, the text of which
amounts to a grand total of 25 small-format pages. Many scholars (myself
among them) might disagree with Kernans qualication of Literary Language as a dreary book on rhetoric, but it is disingenuous and unfair to
imply that anyone could be seriously confused about the volume Kernan
intended to indicate.
Rather than diverting his energies to undercut Kernan, Lerer would
have done better to deliver his own readers the most reliable text he could.
That has not happened. On the last page of the introduction Lerer summarizes what an earlier scholar had concluded about the impugning of
Nietzsches scholarship by philologists of his day: knowledge of linguistic
detail or historical fact alone is enough both to make and criticize and
[sic] argument (p. 14). In the conclusion, Lerer writes: Such philological
state terror hinges, as we all know, on the Newspeakers ability to make

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the old word seem is exact opposite: to transfer Peace to War, Love to
Hate, Fact to Fiction (p. 264). Replacing is with its helps to make this
sentence more readable. The typos in these two sentences may cause the
reader a second or two of uncertainty. Beyond that, they exemplify the
shortcomings that make at least this reader wonder just how careful Lerer
has been in his work and how reliant others may be on what he presents
as fact.
By emblazoning philology in the titles of all but two of his chapters,
Lerer invites examination of how he deals with languages and texts. The
results turn out to be worrisome. The rst Latin phrase quoted in this book
is Guillaume Buds (14671540) Agnosco fateor (quoted again on p.
15 in Latin, p. 39 in English), for which Lerer uses D. F. S. Thomsons
translation I admit I was wrong (p. 3; the translation is not acknowledged
until p. 285 n. 77). The two verbs would usually mean I acknowledge,
I admit or I admit, I confess or something similar. They are actually
notable for not openly stating errorfor not avowing, as my high school
Latin teacher would (but needed rarely to) do, You are right and I am
wrong.
The rst Latin word to be dened in Error and the Academic Self is, unsurprisingly, the verb errare (p. 2). The second is corrigere, of which Lerer
states (pp. 1112): Corrigere in Latin means to draw a straight line. This
denition caught my attention, since from my own readings I could not
remember a Latin passage in which the verb had this precise meaning.
Accordingly, I consulted the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which gives as denotations: 1 To direct (a road) in a straight line; 2 To make straight, straighten
out; 3 To make alterations or improvements in, amend (a piece of writing,
etc.) but includes nothing on the specic meaning Lerer instances and
that later he reiterates for good measure (p. 129). Only much later does
he, when repeating it a third time, casually enfold the standard denition
as well (p. 177). The difference may be small, but it is as meaningful as the
distinction between two points determine a line (which is a commonly
stated principle) and two points determine a road (which I have never
heard said).
The second Greek word that is cited outside of parentheses (p. 8) is
the famous noun paideia, well known from the title of a book by Werner
Jaeger. Here it appears in the form paedaeia, which is tantamount to sliding a marble lid onto the sarcophagus of the cultured erudition that
Jaeger embodied. Is the bizarre spelling merely a typo, like epidiectic on
the same page (p. 8) or mnemonotechnics on the following (p. 9)? (Typo
is actually an interesting word, in that it displaces responsibility from the
scholar onto the typewriternow the keyboardor typesetter.) Those
readers already conversant with these words may not even be irritated at

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encountering three misspellings or typos in the space of two pages, but


what about readers not previously acquainted with the terms who come
away thinking that these forms actually exist? They will not know enough
to break into elegaics (p. 195).
The mistakes raise questions about the reliability of the scholarship in
the book in general, since unfortunately the slackness in the orthography
nds its match in the supporting material in the notes. Take the sentence
in which the last-mentioned word appears: Mnemonotechnicsthat
elaborate system of constructing articial aids to memorizing and displaying complex narrativesoften hinged on coming up with what one
might call parallel narratives: stories that could be used as templates for
remembering information or a sequence of events (p. 9). From my own
work on memory, I am inclined to agree with much of this statement, but
I and anyone else who reads it need to have more precise bibliographical
information than merely a gesture (p. 279 n. 15) toward Mary Carruthers,
The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture in its entirety,
without any specication of page numbers.46
Lerer singles out a plea that Politian (14541494) made in 1489: If
any accents in the Greek words should be missing or wrongly written, let
the well-educated restore or emend them according to their judgment
(p. 21). Apparently Hellenism continues to hold prestige, because Greek
is invoked sporadically in this book, sometimes in the Greek alphabet,
sometimes in transliteration, but with a higher rate of error than Politian
would have tolerated. Look at the passage from Pindar on p. 67. What
should read xruso\v ai0qo/menon pu=r is presented as xrusoz, aidomenou
puz. Maybe the misidentication of the passage as Olympian 1.2, when it
is Olympian 1.1, is to be laid at the feet of Hickes, whom Lerer is quoting,
or Hickess printer, but the shortcomings in the Greek at least look to me
like early-twenty-rst-century mistranscriptions, not the sorts of errors that
would have been countenanced in 17031705, when Hickess volumes
were published.47 In any case, why quote Greek without using accents
and breathings (twice on p. 39-the word seems to be quoted from Luke
1.1, but the reference is not providedand once on p. 40), rather than
simply transliterating? And if the mistakes are Hickess, then why not
signpost them with a [sic] so that readers can know what is going on? A
study of error is sure to attract readers who want to be able to trace the
46. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge
Studies in Medieval Literature, 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).
47. Just by the bye, all the catalogues I have consulted, including the entries on both the
printed and the microche versions available at Lerers own institution, indicate that the
Thesaurus was published by the Sheldonian Theater [e Theatro Sheldoniano] rather than
the Clarendon Press (pace p. 58).

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provenance of error, even without the provocation that this broken line
offers by representing the Greek word for re (as in pyromaniac) as if it
were the Yiddish-derived slang word putz.
Twice in the rst chapter Lerer draws upon eight words in Erasmus
(quoted on p. 53): Neque vero me fugit plurimum adhuc restitisse
mendarum. In the rst instance (p. 35) he dwells upon the rst four
words, which he quotes in Allens translation: Not that I have failed.
Lerer instructs us to Notice the Latin here: literally, not not that I have
failed but really It has not escaped me. Fair enough. But in a second go
at the Latin (p. 53) Lerer wrings from it a second literal meaning: there
still remain some errors in his Seneca that, literally, ew away from him
Although it would be feasible to wrest this meaning from fugit, the natural way to translate the verb literally would not be ew away from him.
but ed away from him. On the basis of these same Latin words Lerer
declares that Erasmuss primary word for textual mistake is mendum (p.
35), with a note that cites a dictionary on three different words: mendum,
menda, and mendose. Is Erasmuss primary word mendum (as Lerer states) or
the closely related menda (used in the passage here)? The bigger question
is how Lerer determined which word for textual mistake was paramount:
Are we to assume that he toiled through all of Erasmuss writings to ascertain the primacy of mendum, that he had access to a lexicon or database,
or that he arrives at this view solely on the basis of this one sentence?
Another short quotation in the rst chapter, this time from Bud, elicits
six sentences of microscopic analysis (p. 39):
Promuit librum tuum solutum adhuc et recentem ab ofcina. Recentem can
mean fresh or young; but it connotes, too, whelped, or newly foaled.
The book is newly born, not even bound, or, more precisely, not yet severed
from the cords of birth. Solutum means freed, loosened, unattached.
The idiom partus solvere means to bear, to bring forth, to be delivered
of offspring. In other words, the book is being born here, much as the
friendship of Erasmus and Bud is being born. And, in both cases, Deloynes
functions as something of a midwife: the deliverer of newly printed books
but also the effective helper in the making of a humanist friendship.

The form promuit at the outset of the quotation is not Latin but must be a
typo for promovit or (less likely) prom(p)sit. Recens can indeed mean fresh
or young. The word may have been used in contexts connected with
birth, but I would like to see the evidence for its carrying with any regularity connotations of whelped or newly foaled: This kind of assertion
warrants a reference to a dictionary or other lexicographic resources. Having noticed elsewhere that Lerer relies on A Latin Dictionary by Charlton T.
Lewis and Charles Short (1879), I found that it includes, in the entry for
recens, citations in the senses Lerer identiesbut both are drawn from

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Varros De re rustica. Unless Erasmus was a passionate Varronian, or even


Varronomaniacal, this is not a solid basis from which to extrapolate.
The comments on solutus are even more misleading. Just as Lerer announces, when used as an adjective it can indeed signify freed, loosened, or unattached. And the verb soluo can refer to delivery through
childbirth. But please note: it is used of a female in labor, not of the infant
being born. Thus, if this sense is present, the passage would not justify
the construe the book is being born here but, rather, the book is giving birth here. The translation of the sentence by D. F. S. Thomson that
Lerer quotes (p. 59) is correct: He . . . produced your book, still unbound
and fresh from the printer. The whole interpretation that Lerer himself
advances is far-fetched.
One passage past the middle of the book (p. 214) that caught my eye
was a discussion of Harry Caplans (18961980) scholarship in his valuable edition and translation of the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium. In this subsection Lerer describes how There, Caplan offers up
a disquisition on the origins of legal custom (Latin iudicatum, Greek
sunhqeia), followed by another daunting bibliography of German, Italian,
British, and American scholars (pp. 9293). If Lerer is going to emulate
or even just reproduce Caplans erudition by citing the Greek word in
the Greek alphabet, then it would be wise for him to gure out how to
represent the eta with an accent (h/). But why does he not transliterate
instead? Although pointing out the bungling of the Greek may be punctilio of the very kind that Lerer probes mockingly, even a passing glance
at his handling of Caplans work uncovers an inattentiveness that extends
dismayingly far beyond mere accent marks. The passage in question does
indeed include consideration of legal custom, but the corresponding
Latin term is consuetudo. That is the term for which sunh/qeia is the Greek
equivalent. The Latin word iudicatum means previous judgment, for
which the Greek is kekrime/non. All of this is plain to see on the two facing
pages of Caplan to which Lerer refers. In other words (and they are most
denitely other words!), Lerer cites English that means one thing and
Latin and Greek that communicate another.
Lerer concludes that Caplans pains to establish the history and meaning
of terms used in the classical rhetorical tradition have been disproven. At
the end of the chapter he quotes a passage from the Rhetorica ad Herennium and opines (p. 220):
This is the very view of rhetoric that de Manand, by implication, Parkerwould refute. And yet it is the logic of the Cornell group, the logic of
historical philology and stemmatic textual criticism, the logic of Caplans
footnote. It is the logic of being sure, of taking a stand, the logic behind the
etymology of status and constitutio.

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Whoever the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium may have been, and
whatever we may think of his qualities of mind, my bet is that his view of
rhetoric has not been refuted even if it has been disputed. Caplans footnotes exude the logic and standards of scholarship, attempting to seek
out and appraise evidence of both primary texts (in this case especially
in ancient rhetorical treatises written in Greek and Latin) and secondary
studies (in what were in his day the modern research languages). I have
a hard time fathoming why Caplans meticulousness about languages and
texts should be seen as an ostentation of erudition and not as an enactment of competence: These footnotes use the occasion of an etymology
to write a genealogy of scholarship. They place the Americans on a par
with the Germans, locate a terminological problem in their English language heritage, make the ancient forensic relevant to the modern legal
(pp. 21415).
The tradition in which Caplan operated continues, as the ongoing
production of the extremely useful Historisches Wrterbuch der Rhetorik or
the fairly recent English translation of Heinrich Lausbergs Handbook of
Literary Rhetoric conrm.48 How much use these treasure-houses will receive on this continent if humanists cease to learn German or to frequent
academic libraries, I cannot guess, but I would still gamble that a hundred
years from now Caplans Loeb Classical Library volume of the Rhetorica
ad Herennium will sell more copies annually than any reprint of de Man.
Wagers aside, what is the point in critiquing Harry Caplan for believing that (p. 219) this whole process [Caplans genealogy of rhetorical
terms?] is not about indeterminacy but about security? Caplan was not
a deconstructionist or even a poststructuralist avant la lettre (or la parole).
So what? Is it not being a trie totalitarian, to say nothing of being pass,
to insist that the only certainty is indeterminacy?
Regardless of the theoretical inclinations that a given scholar displays,
I for one always welcome evidence that a book or article can be trusted in
its scholarship. To me the number of mistakes in the book under review
is a cause for unease. To move beyond Greek and Latin, there are slips
in the quotation of other languages. Most of the time these are trivial,
with a letter omitted or added here and there; examples in French would
include combien taient errons et insufsantes les ides (p. 13: the
mistake is in errons) and aux passage (p. 311 n. 24); in Italian errore for
errori (p. 20); in German die Lebensgeschichte jedes einzelnene Wortes
(p. 120), altmodish (p. 269), in der luft (p. 272), and So schwer
48. Historisches Wrterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 1, ed. Gert Ueding (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992 ), and Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson, trans. Matthew T. Bliss,
Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

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est ist (p. 308 n. 1). When Lerer quotes a passage Eliot transcribed
from Jacob Grimms Deutsche Grammatik (pp. 131132), he species that
he reproduce[s] the text as Eliot transcribed it, without correcting for
spelling or capitalization (p. 299 n. 76). To hold back from altering the
original text is laudable, since it would have been customary in Eliots
time not to capitalize and to follow a slightly different orthography from
what is conventional today, but it would have been nice for Lerer to have
prefaced a parenthetic or bracketed m or to have appended a sic if indeed
Eliot wrote abwege eiden rather than the correct (and intelligible) abwege
meiden. On the basis of other mistranscriptions in the book, I have my
doubts as to who is responsible for this one.
Most of the mistakes in the presentation of modern languages have
no impact on the interpretations being advanced. Yet they do leave one
wondering just how much condence to have when Lerer is grappling with
foreign-language texts, especially German, that are not also available in
English translation. He shows more ease in grappling with Derrida than
with der die das. To translate einer . . . im guten Sinne gebildeten Persnlichkeit as a personality . . . brought up with good sense (p. 243) is
worrisome: A more correct and natural rendering would be an educated
person in the best sense of the word. By a similar token, the closing paragraph of the book (pp. 27475) contains a quotation from Stefan Zweig
that is translated into English. The English is ne, but the German of the
note does not quite match, being a sentence longer and containing the
(unavoidable?) typo unvermeidlicherweise (p. 316 n 28).
On rst happening on Lerers pair of spelling errors in the name of
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (p. 13: the two are in WillamowizI
do not count his using an o-umlaut for the conventional oe in the posthyphenate part of the the name), I gave him the benet of the doubt
and wondered if he were playing a game with the reader, since the topic
under discussion was a review by Wilamowitz that pinpointed every factual
mistake in Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy, but by the end I realized that the
extent of the misspellings, mishandlings of languages, and other mistakes
was so widespread as to plant us in the realm of the ludicrous rather than
the ludic. The garbling of Wilamowitzs name can be explained as a result
of the same ideologically ecumenical carelessness that elsewhere gives us J.
Hills Miller (p. 249). Such errors are less frequent in Gumbrechts book,
although even he once omits the von in Wilamowitzs name (p. 83).
To pass from reading and writing to arithmetic, my fears about the
reliability of the dates in Lerers book began when I read (p. 262) that
Forbidden Planet was released in December 1956 and later saw it again dated
in 1956 (p. 273) but remembered its having been described in the introduction as the 1957 science ction lm (p. 4). The rst dates I decided

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Metaphilology

271

to check were those of William Dwight Whitney, professor of comparative


philology and Sanskrit at Yale from 1853 until his death in 1894 (p. 7).
What I found was that Whitney was professor of Sanskrit from 1854 and
professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology from 1869. My gaze next
fell upon the bottom of the facing page, where appears another date:
As early as 1808-barely a decade after Sir William Jones established the
grammatical relationship of Sanskrit to the ancient European languages
(p. 6). Since Sir William died on 27 April 1794, barely a decade seems
hardly justied. Flipping ahead, I happened upon a biographical sketch
of Ren Wellek that began Born in Prague in 1905 (p. 10). Welleks
birth date was 1903, his birthplace Vienna. As for the grave of this prolic
and painstaking scholar, he is rolling in it right now.
As Lerer demonstrates ably, wandering and error can have their good
sides and their bad sides. For me the two dimensions are crystalized in
the opposed expressions knight errant and arrant knave. The rst is
a knight who roves in search of adventure. The second is an egregiously
unprincipled man. Both errant and arrant come from the French, which
derives in turn from the Latin errare and the Late Latin itinerari. Pairing
the two English phrases here is a small gesture on my part toward Wortphilologie, which, as I speculated at the outset, may be the aspect of philology
that comes most often to the attention of nonphilologists. Like much of
the rest of philology, it is an undertaking that can lead to adventure but
that (and make no mistake about it) requires principles if the quest is to
eventuate in success and to deserve emulation. Lerer ends his book (pp.
27475) by using a couple of sentences from Stefan Zweig to characterize
the ego and id of the migr and philologist. Conspicuously lacking is the
superego. No doubt reviewers exist whose joy is to read for the mistakes,
but I would rather have the authors of the books that come my way do
the spell checking and the fact checking beforehand so that I could concentrate on their ideasor on my own research and writing. Gumbrecht
refers to the philologists duty and potentially cathartic experience of
cleaning up all too subjective and therefore anachronistic leftovers from
his play with the imagination (p. 23). When a scholar tidies up after
himself, such activity is only a fair part of the process, but we are not supposed to be janitors or housecleaners for others.
At a juncture when many academic presses provide less in the way
of either initial reviews or later copyediting than was once the norm,
it would be niceregardless of whether we call ourselves philologists,
comparat(iv)ists, literary critics, literary theorists, cultural historians, medievalists, or anything elseto achieve if not a return to philology then
at least a renewed commitment to care in scholarship. Maybe the conviction is hopelessly old-fashioned on my part, but I will utter it nonetheless:

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Showing concern about words, facts, and ideas alike is something we owe
to ourselves, to the divisions of learning and thought we represent, and last
but not least, to literature. If a rephilologization of studies on language
and literature is needed, then we should begin with it in this ambit. 49
Whether we are philologizing or metaphilogizing, let us love the logos! 50
49. Rephilologization is my calque on the German Rephilologisierung, which I encountered rst in Maaz, Die editorische Macht, p. 113. Maaz refers to Horst Turk, Philologische
Grenzgnge. Zum Cultural Turn in der Literatur (Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 2003),
which offers the most exhaustive and recent theoretical tract in favor of applying philology
within a variety of disciplines.
50. Although my closing sentence may succumb to the very sort of cheery triviality that
Gumbrecht attacks (pp. 6869), it is no less complex or more unnecessary than his own
conclusion (pp. 85, 87), which is mainly that the vita contemplativa requires free time. I
happen to concur with him heartily in that closing observation.

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