Philology and The Turn Away From The Linguistic Turn

http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/flor.32.007 - Julie Orlemanski <julieorlemanski@uchicago.edu> - Monday, July 17, 2017 9:53:16 AM - IP Address:198.255.239.
Philology and the Turn Away from the Linguistic Turn

Julie Orlemanski
Philology is a complicated word, one that condenses in itself the historical

and methodological vicissitudes of modern language study. For the last three
decades almost any invocation of philology in North American academia has
also entailed claims about the past and future of literary studies. The heteroge-
neous notions of scholarship gathered under the term have crystallized gradually
into what I suggest is a pervasive historiographic form, which pits the disciplines
institutional realizations against its idealized origins and futures. How academics
invoked philology before and during the period when Speculum published its
special issue on The New Philologythe period of the linguistic turnseemed
tacitly to advocate for a de-institutionalized philology. In the following pages, I
will set the New Philology within the context of the linguistic turn and within
the history of philology in the twentieth-century academy. Ultimately, I suggest
that the polarization of philological ideals and institutional realities no longer
serves the aims of medieval studies. At the current moment in the turn away
from the linguistic turn, scholars might more fruitfully use philology to redefine
the place of language within literary studies and to advocate for the institutional
conditions that would make new philological discoveries possible.
The linguistic turn characterizes the time and milieu of the New Philology. It
denotes the cross-disciplinary consensus, beginning in the 1960s, that language is
* I would like to thank Rory Critten, Boris Maslov, Arthur Russell, Markus Stock, Richard Utz,
and Florilegiums anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. I also thank Robert
Meyer-Lee for the opportunity to present an early version of my claims at the 2015 meeting
of the Medieval Academy of America.
Florilegium, vol. 32 (2015): 157-181 DOI: 10.3138/flor.32.007 Florilegium

http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/flor.32.007 - Julie Orlemanski <julieorlemanski@uchicago.edu> - Monday, July 17, 2017 9:53:16 AM - IP Address:198.255.239.2
158 Julie Orlemanski
central to the analysis carried out in the humanities and social sciences. In the torque
of the linguistic turn, textuality and linguistic signs acted as master metaphors
across various fields of study. Images, rituals, social organization, cultural exchange,
historical alterity, and psychic life were all variously analogized to language. The
linguistic turn overlaps with the trends known as poststructuralism, postmodern-
ism, and the rise of theorybut the phrase places particular emphasis on the role
of language within these developments. Although the phrase barely appears in the
Speculum issue, references to its associated theoretical frameworks are everywhere.1
Indeed, the special issue had a double role to play with respect to the linguistic turn:
it commented on a scholarly trend already well underway and delivered that trend
to the heart of medieval studies, in the fields premier North American journal.
In 1990, the meaning of philology was contested and shifting. The field had
long fallen from the institutional prominence it had enjoyed in the late nineteenth
century, and the term had acquired an archaic ring in American academia.2 The
gap between philologys two primary definitionsbetween its narrow reference
to historical language study and its much broader etymological sense, the love of
languagegradually became the reason why the term was invoked. The words
contrary senses, of discipline and affection, were cast as antagonists within a par-
ticular historical plot: the institutionalization of scholarly practice in the recent
past had vitiated some originary wellspring of philological ardour. In a further
twist on this historiographic emplotment of its two basic definitions, philology
acquired yet another meaning and renewed prominence during the height of the
linguistic turn, thanks to Paul de Mans brief but influential essay The Return to
Philology. In the wake of de Mans essay, literary theorists as well as conventionally
philological scholars began to contend anew over the significance of the word. The
Speculum issue on the New Philology was part of that contention.
Debates among medievalists since the issues appearance have tended to
equate philology with textual editing.3 The following year saw the publication
1 The phrase appears only once, within quotation marks in Gabrielle M. Spiegels contribu-
tion, where Spiegel describes the current critical climate as a seeming flight from reality
to language or linguistic turn; Spiegel, History, Historicism, 60. On the retrospective
force of the linguistic turn, see Surkis, When Was the Linguistic Turn?
2 For the point that the term philology does not appear archaic to European medievalists, see
Utz, Resistance to (The New) Medievalism, 151-52.
3 For instance, see the responses gathered in Busby, ed., Towards a Synthesis, and in Paden,
ed., The Future of the Middle Ages.
DOI: 10.3138/flor.32.007 Florilegium 32 (2015)

Philology and the Turn Away from the Linguistic Turn 159
of a closely related collection entitled The New Medievalism, in which The New
Philology was demoted to a subheading, the title for a block of chapters largely
about editorial method. Certainly, the focus on textual editing is consonant with
some of the events leading up to the New Philology volumeincluding the 1989
publication of Bernard Cerquiglinis loge de la varianteand also with the sub-
sequent research interests of the volumes editor, Stephen G. Nichols. However,
as the contents of the 1990 special issue demonstrate, philology in this context
did not refer straightforwardly to textual criticism. Gabrielle M. Spiegel recalls
accepting Nicholss invitation to contribute to the collection although I had no
idea what he meant by the New Philology.4 The term was a provocation, not
a clear designator. Like one of Raymond Williamss keywords, the meaning of
philology was inextricably bound up with the problems it was being used to
discuss.5 Below I seek to bring its semantic complexity into focus by moving
back and forth between disciplinary history and the particular use of the word
by the contributors to the special issue.
The linguistic turn and philology remain terms not only for historicizing
literary study but also for imagining its futures. The twenty-five years since the
special issues publication have witnessed a reorientation, a turn away from the
linguistic turn, as it were. In her 2014 retrospective account of the Speculum spe-
cial issue, Spiegel writes that there now seems to be a growing sense that what
was variously called the linguistic turn, postmodernism, or poststructuralism
has run its course.6 Yet even if the turn is overhaving disaggregated into,
alternately, assumptions commonly accepted and claims gratingly outmodedit
nonetheless remains to be seen what the turning away is a turning towards.
Literary study, after all, occupies a vexed position within the turn away from
the linguistic turn. Scholars of literatureunlike, for instance, historians or
anthropologistsremain uniquely bound to what has been written down. When
the cross-disciplinary trend is to acknowledge the limits of language, how do we
theorize anew the interpretation of texts?
Under current intellectual and institutional circumstances, philology holds
promise for redefining the disciplinary (rather than transdisciplinary or quasi-
universal) significance of language. Its connotations of technicalism, moreover,
4 Spiegel, Reflections on The New Philology, 40.

5 Williams, Keywords, 15.
6 Spiegel, Reflections on The New Philology, 48.
Florilegium 32 (2015) DOI: 10.3138/flor.32.007

might be recuperated to oppose the de-skilling of academic labour. Since 1990,

many commentators have called upon philology, attaching it to new predicates
and tasking it with sundry roles. The most promising of these deployments, I
suggest, are those that maintain what might be called an emic, or an insiders
approach to philology. These writers locate their own scholarly practice, and
literary studies generally, within the philological domain. If philology is the
discipline of making sense of texts, as the Indologist Sheldon Pollock puts it,
then philologys central task is ongoing.7 Instead of the habituated bifurcation of
philology into a rejected institutional form and a remote ideal, I advocate a more
immanent practice of critical philology, like that being carried out currently by
Michelle R. Warren and Karla Mallette. The works of Warren and Mallette serve
as models, among many possible, for what medievalist philology might do to
negotiate the disciplinary status of literary studies and medieval studies in the
wake of the linguistic turn.
Philology by 1990
Like most intellectual movements, the linguistic turn was neither uniformly
received nor consistently adopted. Within literary studies, medievalists were
perceived, and perceived themselves, as especially resistant to such theoretical
approaches, and this resistance was understood to produce a kind of historical
unevenness between subfields. Medieval studies appeared out of date, untimely.
In the pages of the Speculum special issue, philology is employed to name and
negotiate such untimeliness. Suzanne Fleischman, for instance, points to phi-
lologys status, in the minds of many, as a dessicated and dogmatic textual
praxis.8 The mismatch between postmodernism and medievalist scholarship
demands new directions that will justifyfor ourselves and notably for our
studentscontinuing to do philology at all.9 Among the pertinent objec-
tions to philology that Siegfried Wenzel lists are that it is old hat and practised
in ignorance of the ideas of the linguistic turn, which set modern man very
much apart from his nineteenth-century forebears.10 To be sure, both Fleisch
man and Wenzel suggest that medievalist philology has the power to revitalize
7 Pollock, Future Philology, 934.

8 Fleischman, Philology, Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text, 19.
9 Fleischman, Philology, Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text, 19.
10 Wenzel, Reflections, 12, 13.

itselfhence, the New Philology. However, the words first function is to mark
the archaism and the resulting precarity of medieval studies.
Howard Bloch opens his contribution by troping on the historicity of philol-
ogy: I will argue not only that there is nothing new in the term New Philology
[...], but that the old philology was in fact a new philology, and he calls upon the
original spirit of philology expressed in Giambattista Vicos Nuova Scienza.11
According to Bloch, the New Philologyor a certain unsettling rethinking
of medieval literature [...] beginning in the late 1950srejoins this original
spirit, in a revival or a return, mutatis mutandis.12 Between Vicos philological
enterprise and its recent renewal lies a rejected middle, or what Bloch calls the
philology of the interlude, propounded by figures like Gaston Paris (d. 1903)
and Joseph Bdier (d. 1938) and aspiring to the certainty of an exact science.13
The rejected interlude coincides with the institutionalization of modern language
study in French academia and culture more broadly. Like Fleischman and Wen-
zel, who acknowledge philologys archaism only to surmount it, Bloch discovers
within the word a historiographic form that seems to secure a disciplinary future
from the threat of the disciplinary past. Blochs brief history, from origin through
interlude to renewal, exemplifies what I take to be the plot, the story line, that
was gradually secreted into the word philology over the course of the twentieth
century. Philology gestures to a distant but vibrant beginning, whether in ancient
Alexandria or Renaissance England or Enlightenment Italy, a beginning that has
been blocked or crusted over, betrayed, by more recent, and more institutional,
developments. The vitality of a renewed philology depends on the resuscitation
of its more originary sense. Moreover, these historical placeholdersoriginal
spirit and interlude, distant past and recent institutioncorrespond to philol-
ogys main dictionary definitions: Love of learning and literature and The
study of the structure and development of language, respectively.14
The modern history of academic literary study begins with philologyargu-
ably in the 1780s with Sir William Joness investigations of Indo-European, sub-
sequently developed in new directions by scholars like Wilhelm von Humboldt,
11 Bloch, New Philology and Old French, 38.

12 Bloch, New Philology and Old French, 38 n. 1, 39.
14 Ziolkowski, What Is Philology?, 5, citing the original edition of the Oxford English
Dictionary.

the Brothers Grimm, and Franz Bopp.15 Two ideologies undergirded early philo-
logical research, that of the origin of national culture in language and that of the
scienticity of philological research, crucially mediating the distinction between
Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft, as John Guillory notes.16 Nationalism
and positivism have remained strongly implicated in philologys narrow, institu-
tional sensethat of the rejected middle or the philology of the interlude. In
the introduction to The New Philology, for instance, Nichols claims that a grossly
anachronistic conception of philology, formulated under the impulse of political
nationalism and scientific positivism during the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury remains far too current in medieval studies.17 Indeed, the entanglements
of philology with scientism and, as described by Edward Said, with colonial-
ism continue to provide a moral imperative for the disciplines supersession or
reinvention.18
When American higher education shifted to the model of the German
research university in the 1870s and began to organize itself by departments,
it was the philologists who determined the direction and orientation of the
modern language faculties.19 Still, the ability of philologists to define academic
professionalism was contested from the beginning, as Gerald Graff points out,
by a model of literary criticism that valued liberal or general culture against
that of narrowly specialized research.20 This early power struggle in language
departments corresponds to the division of philologys two meanings, one tech-
nical (if not pedantic), the other sweeping (if not vague). The diremption is clear
even in individual usage. Graff offers the example of the Anglo-Saxonist Albert
S. Cook, who in his oratory urged the expansive, humanist meaning of philol-
ogy, but whose research was resolutely positivist, philological in its narrower
sense. Graff concludes, it was primarily a ritualistic event when philologists like
Cook reminded their colleagues of the need to revive the older, comprehensive
meaning of philology.21 Yet if Graff dismisses the invocation of this broader
15 Another possible origin is Friedrich August Wolfs 1777 admission to the University of Gt-
tingen as the first student of philology; see Pollock, Introduction to World Philology, 6.
16 Guillory, Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines, 28.
17 Nichols, Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture, 1.
18 See Said, Orientalism, esp. chap. 2.
19 Guillory, Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines, 31.
20 Graff, Professing Literature, 55.

sense as a mere ceremonial gesture, 22 I would suggest it is just this rhetorical

functionmarking the separation between technique and ideal, gesturing to
a path from romanticized past through fallen present to desired futurethat
became increasingly inextricable from the usefulness of the word.
It was in the late 1930s that criticism, as opposed to historicist or philological
research, began to attain to the academic recognition that had previously eluded
it. Moreover, the establishment of linguistics departments beginning in the mid-
1930s meant that modern language departments were relieved of the systematic
study of language per se. Criticisms triumph appeared secure when, in 1951, the
Modern Language Association added criticism to its constitution and, in 1954,
Harvard University stopped requiring its doctoral students in English to study
Anglo-Saxon. This was the period, then, when philology began to connote not
just technicalism but also obsolescence. In his contribution to the Speculum spe-
cial issue, Lee Patterson points out that even after the ascent of New Criticism,
medievalists continued to credentialize themselves according to an apparently
outdated philological model. The arcane strangeness of the Middle Ages con-
ferred upon the medievalist an unquestionably professional identity, maintained
by developing to massive dimensions the armature of scholarly techniques and
abilities required of the aspiring medievalist: not just languages, but paleography,
philology, codicology, diplomatics.23 In turn, medieval studies paid the price of
becoming a marginalized institution entrenched in an outmoded positivism,
perceived by other literary scholars and critics as a site of pedantry and antiquari-
anism, a place to escape from the demands of modern intellectual life.24 Philology
marks medievalists exile from the now of mainstream literary studies.
Simultaneously with the ascendence of New Criticism, however, the war-time
arrival in the United States of European scholars like Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer,
and Ren Wellek lent a new intellectual vitality to philology. Thus, even as philologys
relevance was constricting in English departments, it gained cosmopolitan prestige
in Romance languages and comparative literature, with their influx of migrs. Erich
Auerbach, who became a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale in
1950, is exemplary. His magisterial war-time study Mimesis turned his philological
and literary-historical erudition upon the full arc of the western canon. Auerbach

23 Patterson, On the Margin, 102.
24 Patterson, On the Margin, 87, 103, 87.

worked from brief excerpts of longer works, submitting each passage to detailed
stylistic analysis and then interpreting his formal and narrative observations in
light of broader historical questions. Translated into English in 1954, the work
resonated with the practices of New Critics and showed that philology, literary
history, and humanist criticism might mutually inhere. In his 1952 essay Philol-
ogy and Weltliteratur, Auerbach advocated a global and cosmopolitan role for
philology, indeed, drawing it into equation with world literature.
Nichols, for his part, criticizes such mid-century masters of philology for
their reliance on edited texts, rational products of philological endeavor, rather
than manuscripts, to which Nichols urges a return.25 This prior generation had
an interest in not the materiality of texts [...] so much as their ideality and
sought a fixed text as transparent as possible.26 Nichols sketches the project of
returning medieval studies to the medieval origins of philology, to its roots in
a manuscript culture where, as Bernard Cerquiglini remarks, medieval writing
does not produce variants; it is variance.27 Nichols introduces the now ubiqui
tous term manuscript matrix, using it seven times in ten pages, to describe
the interplay of manuscripts paratextual supplements in (as he remarks several
years later) an historically determinate representational space unlike any that
has existed since the advent of print culture.28 The word matrix appears just
one other time in his Introduction, in the first sentence: In medieval studies,
philology is the matrix out of which all else springs.29 With this prominently
reiterated word, Nichols stitches together philology, medieval studies, and manu-
scripts. Medieval studies matrix and origin are philology; manuscript culture
constitutes the medieval origins of philology, and it was only a limited and
narrow philology, the rejected interlude of the prior generation, which treated
the manuscript from the perspective of text and language alone.30
In time, of course, New Criticism also fell from favour within literary studies,
thanks in part to styles of scholarship fostered under the label theory, in which
25 Nichols, Introduction, 2.
26 Nichols, Introduction, 4, 3.
27 Nichols, Introduction, 1, translating Cerquiglini, loge de la variante, 111.
28 Nichols, Philology and Its Discontents, 119.
30 Nichols, Introduction, 7 (emphasis added).

the central tenets of the linguistic turn circulated to literature departments. As

outlined above, the linguistic turn refers to the new conceptual centrality of
language in post-war Anglo-American academia. Under the influence of struc-
tural linguistics, language conceived as a system assumed prominence in the
scholarship of such diverse fields as history, psychology, anthropology, and liter-
ary criticism. The interactions of signs within formal structures, or what might
be called semiotic relations, came to assume the status of ur-logics for culture,
cognition, and meaningparticularly as those relations were formulated by
linguist and philologist Ferdinand de Saussure in the early twentieth century.
Anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss influentially applied Saussures ideas to the
analysis of kinship and myth, launching structuralism in the process. Structur-
alists continued to adapt Saussurean linguistics as they sought to comprehend
systems other than language in semiotic terms. Those thinkers who came to
be known as poststructuralistJacques Derrida most prominently among
themsoon challenged structuralist claims to the coherence of the structures
they identified. Yet even while poststructuralists disputed structuralist system-
icity, they tended to accept its basic semiotic analogization, or the homology
between language and other complex phenomena. Poststructuralists accord-
ingly carried out their global critiques of closure and meaning through the
analysis of writing.
Philosophy also witnessed a linguistic turn, though its basis was in the works
of Gottlob Frege rather than Saussure. Indeed, the 1967 essay collection The Lin-
guistic Turn, edited by philosopher Richard Rorty, was partly responsible for
bringing the phrase to prominence. Both philosophys turn and the Saussurean
one that was influential in literary studies emphasized the internal structuration
of language and the indirect, mediated, and contingent qualities of linguistic ref-
erence.31 This semiotic (as opposed to semantic) focus, joined with the tendency
to analogize diverse entities to language (or diverse ways of understanding to
linguistic understanding), provided the intellectual core of the linguistic turn.
In his contribution to Speculums special issue, Bloch identifies four assump-
tions that he believes the new philology shares with philologys original spirit.32
The first, third, and fourth of these together can be taken to articulate something
31 See Lee, Talking Heads, 1-15.


like a credo for the linguistic turn in literary studies. According to Bloch both
originary and new philologies agree on
(1) the privileging of language over its referent in the production of
meaning, which means that some attention is paid not only to what
words mean but how they mean [...] (3) the irreductibility of the let-
ter within the process of literary understanding, or the resistance of
poetry to anything like a univocal meaning and of literary studies to
the exactitude of a physical science. And (4), given the impossibility of
ever exhausting the semantic richness of even the most finite element
of medieval poetics [...], the New Philology has as a corollary the
reinscription of something like the mysterium of poetry.33
To paraphrase: language cannot be reduced to reference or meaning, and poetry
is a privileged form of semiotic play, condensing the obscurity of language into
a justly revered mystery. Put in simplest terms, Bloch writes, the closer one
reads the medieval text, the less it is possible to maintain the positivist position
of literary transparency.34 Indeed, a lexis of fascination with difficult signifying
permeates the special issuein the celebration of textual gaps or interstices,
multiplicity and variance, semiosis, eclecticism, diversity, the irreduct-
ibility of the letter, the pregnant plays of the letter, the mediatory effects of
poetic elaboration, particularity, the plurality of micronarratives, and what
is self-contradictory and problematic, opaque.35 In turn, the tenets of the
linguistic turn licensed a tight argumentative circuit between intricate poetic
analysis, on the one hand, and global claims about language and textuality, on the
other. Blochs essay, for instance, goes on to demonstrate the truth of his asser-
tions about language through close analysis of several lais by Marie de France.36
As analysis travelled around this circuit, moving from poem to general thesis
and back again, it linked the most minute formal observations with the broadest
claims about signification, in vertiginous leaps that helped make the linguistic
turn such a heady development within literary study. The argumentative model
can be understood to revisit a fundamental problem in the constitution of modern
33 Bloch, New Philology and Old French, 38-39 (emphasis original).

35 Respectively, on pages 8, 2, 5, 90, 9, 39, 47, 45, 106, 90, 46, and 46 of Speculums special issue
on The New Philology.

language departments, namely, the relationship between language and literature.

While New Criticism had seemed to vanquish philology and re-orient modern
language departments around poetry, the status of language per se remained
uncertain. The linguistic turn managed to bring language and literature back
together while revising the erstwhile dominance of language: rather than the
scienticity of linguistics shaping the study of literature, the semantic inexhaust-
ibility of poetry pointed towards the true nature of language.
The second of the principles shared by an originary philology and its present-
day renewalaccording to Bloch, in the principle omitted in the passage quoted
aboveis contextualist: Vico and the New Philologists alike advocate the con-
textualizing of literature both with respect to historical process and with respect
to other discourses of man such as philosophy, anthropology, and the social
sciences.37 This claim for context, indeed shared by all the contributors essays,
acts to place the New Philology adjacent to the New Historicism. Like deconstruc-
tion, New Historicism seemed to offer a partial break from the formalist closure
of New Criticism. It oversaw the return of history, politics, and non-literary texts,
but it did so by extending the domain laid open to close reading. In 1989, one year
before Speculums special issue appeared, the landmark essay collection The New
Historicism was published, consolidating new developments transpiring, as one
influential essay put it, within Renaissance studies, as in Anglo-American literary
studies generally.38 The metonymic slide from Renaissance studies to the entirety
of literary enquiry was more than an accidental consequence of specialization
among the first expositors of New Historicism (Stephen Greenblatt most promi-
nent among them). In the Speculum special issue, Lee Patterson argues that New
Historicisms focus on the early modern reflects the Renaissances own ideology of
its modernity, supposedly breaking from a benighted medieval past. The practical
consequence was the exclusion of medievalists from the New Historicist project.
In claiming the epithet new, however, The New Philology and, in the following
year, The New Medievalism, set themselves in close proximity, if not competition,
with New Historicism. Sarah Kay suggests that this naming was meant to be an
outflanking maneuver whereby medievalists could go one better than their col-
leagues of the Renaissance: medievalism had been likewise renovated, only more
37 Bloch, New Philology and Old French, 38-39.

38 Montrose, Professing the Renaissance, 15.

interestingly.39 Indeed, Patterson argues that the inclusion of the Middle Ages in
New Historicist consideration would have effects greater than simply delivering
new content for historical understanding. By contradicting the master narrative
first put in place by the Renaissance, medievalist historicism would dismantle
modernitys confident self-understanding and endow medieval studies with the
powers it needs to hold its own.40
In The New Historicism, Louis A. Montrose, a scholar of English Renaissance
literature, famously characterized the post-structuralist orientation to history
now emerging in literary studies in terms of a chiasmus, as a reciprocal concern
with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history.41 For New Historicism,
literary analysis and historical research remain ultimately indistinguishable.
Spiegels contribution to the Speculum issue takes up precisely this indistinction
as a problem. Her essay attempts to think beyond what she calls the semiotic
challenge. She explains, As a language-based conception of reality, semiotics
has disrupted traditional literary and historical modes of interpretation by under-
mining materialist theories of experience and the ideas of causality and agency
inherent in them.42 According to Spiegel, historians adoption of the ideas of the
linguistic turn culminated in a radical foregrounding and reconceptualization
of the problem of text and context.43 Indeed, Spiegel locates cultural historys
failure in its inability to establish a relationship between text and context that
does not lead to their mutual implication in a textually conceived universe.44
Spiegel clears the path for her own corrective by drawing attention to what
she understands to be a crucial difference between literary studies and history,
namely, the incommensurability in the object of investigation. The proper
object for a literary scholar is a text, while for a historian, it is something else.
Spiegel writes, While the text is an objective given, an existing artifact (in its
material existence if not in its constitution as a specifically literary work), the
object of historical study must be constituted by the historian long before its
meaning can begin to be disengaged.45 In other words, what counts as context,
39 Kay, Analytical Survey, 298, 296.

40 Patterson, On the Margin, 101, 90.
41 Montrose, Professing the Renaissance, 20.
42 Spiegel, History, Historicism, 60.
4 4 Spiegel, History, Historicism, 68.

what shows up for the historians analysis, is not known in advance. To be sure,
Spiegels insistence on the objective given-ness of texts is out of step with claims
advanced elsewhere in the special issue: neither the oral dimensions of medi-
eval literature (Fleischman) nor the visual and material aspects of manuscripts
(Nichols) have conventionally been givens within literary studies. Nonetheless,
in foregrounding the constitution of objects proper to different fields of study,
Spiegel draws attention to different disciplines variable relationships to language.
She urges her readers to reject the absorption of history by textualitywhat
is needed is the elaboration of a theoretical position capable of satisfying the
demands of both literary criticism and history as separate yet interdependent
disciplinary domains.46 Indeed, Spiegels prescient account anticipates many of
the concerns that have circulated in the aftermath of the linguistic turn.
The final phase of the entangled history of philology and the linguistic turn
hinges on a brief 1982 essay by the literary critic and theorist Paul de Man,
reprinted in his 1986 collection The Resistance to Theory.47 De Man, a professor of
French and Comparative Literature at Yale and a prominent exponent of decon-
struction in the United States, titled his essay The Return to Philology, and it was
to prove remarkably influential with respect to the fate of the word. Despite the
essays highly idiosyncratic act of redefinition, it was The Return to Philology
that placed philology back on the front lines of methodological debate.
De Man wrote his piece in response to a polemic by Harvard English professor
Walter Jackson Bate, published earlier in 1982 in Harvard Magazine. Entitled The
Crisis in English Studies, the essay blamed the crisis on academic specialism.48
Bate characterizes the first phase of such specialization as above all, philologythe
study of words historically, which achieved a stranglehold on English studies from
the 1880s to the 1940s; this phase was followed by a new specialism, the New
Criticism, which toppled the old emphasis on philology, sources, and the rest.49
New Criticism, then, was supplanted by structuralism and the strange stepchild
of structuralism known as deconstructionism.50 Bate counterposes to this lam-
entable specialization his own ideal of Renaissance-style literae humaniores. Thus,

47 Originally published in The Times Literary Supplementfor Friday, 10 Dec. 1982, pp. 1355-56.
Citations below refer to the reprint in The Resistance to Theory.
48 Bate, The Crisis in English Studies, 48.

for Bate, philology is a periodizing term, coincident with the institutionalization

of literary studies in the American academy starting in the 1880s; subsequent
literary-critical movements are mere variations on its expertise-driven, tech-
nocratic modernity. This era of institutionalization is Bates rejected middle,
analogous to Blochs philology of the interval and Pattersons professional
sequestration.51 These are episodes understood to alienate philological practice
from a more vital origin, the human spirit in language.52 Indeed, the Renais-
sance ideal of humane letters functions for Bate as this lost essence.53
De Man responds to Bates jeremiad with a redefinition of the term philol-
ogy that was perhaps unprecedented in the twentieth-century circulation of
the word. As I have shown, philology tends to define phases in disciplinary
history and to cut distinctions in the spectrum of methodological variation.
By contrast, de Mans philology flattens out historical and methodological
difference. In effect, he returns to philology only to collapse the three phases
and three practices that Bate invokedthe study of words historically, New
Criticism, and poststructuralism. De Man does this first by insisting that a
famous Harvard undergraduate coursewhich was taught by New Critic
Reuben Brower and built around decontextualized close readingwas actu-
ally, counter-intuitively, an ally and cousin to high-powered French theory.54
De Man insists that both what he calls mere reading and poststructuralist
theoryinsofar as they tarry with the bafflement produced by particular
phrases and figuresare identical in their refusal to reduce language and lit-
erature to meaning.55 Without further explanation, this is what de Man then
calls philology: in practice, the turn to theory occurred as a return to philol-
ogy, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it
produces.56 With this stroke of redefinition, all of literary study stands simpli-
fied and monolithic against what it is nottheology, ethics, psychology, or
intellectual history.57 Exceptionally, de Man makes of philology not a term
of disciplinary differentiation but rather consolidation.

54 De Man, The Return to Philology, 23.
55 De Man, The Return to Philology, 24, 23.

However idiosyncratic this usage may have been, The Return to Philology was
a turning point in the itinerary of the term. De Mans gloss seems to have lodged itself
in the fissures already present in the words meanings and taken root. His account
began to circulate, acquire plausibility, and accrue debate. As Jan Ziolkowski notes,
Whatever [de Man] meant by philology, his advocacy of a return to it sufficed in that
period to make the term chic and to put it into contention.58 A professor of Classics
and Comparative Literature at Harvard, Ziolkowski recalls that when he set out to
organize a conference entitled What Is Philology? it was de Mans essay that made
the topic palatable to his colleagues: The apparent advocacy of a new and improved
form of philology by one of the foremost literary theorists in America made the topic
relevant to many who would otherwise have paid little attention to it.59 The 1988
conference is generally recognized as the first larger forum for re-defining philology
in what was to be a mounting series of conversations and publications, all of them
contending over the meaning of the word that de Man had set in play.60
The impact of The Return to Philology illustrates that the historical lives
of words do not themselves observe particular philological decorum. A term
may veer away suddenly, or absorb a novel denotation, or crack apart from its
etymological roots. With de Mans essay, a new semantic wing opened in the
philological edifice, one that Jonathan Culler calls anti-foundational philology.61
Yet despite the dehistoricizing, despecifying thrust of de Mans redefinition, his
sense did not blot out earlier, historically articulated meanings. Instead, it recon-
stellated them within field-wide debates, wherein philology abruptly returned to
prominence. For instance, Culler states in his published remarks from the 1988
Harvard conference, The play of the term philology, it seems to me, is valuable
insofar as it captures the crucial tension between what he calls reconstructive
and critical methods.62 A subsequent episode in the play of the term took place
within the special issue on The New Philology.
My discussion thus far has traced the divergent meanings of the term philol-
ogy in the pages of the Speculum issue and in the course of the words circulation
in North American academia. According to its Greek roots, philology is the love
of language, but it also names the positivistic nineteenth-century discipline of
58 Ziolkowski, Metaphilology, 242-43.

59 Ziolkowski, What Is Philology?, 4.
60 Utz, Resistance to (The New) Medievalism, 152 n. 2.
61 Culler, Anti-Foundational Philology, 49-52.
62 Culler, Anti-Foundational Philology, 52.

studying language historically. Philological techniques have been called upon to

reconstruct linguistic meaning, but its poststructuralist return casts it as prior to
and outside of meaning as such. The disjunction among these several senses became
the reason to use the term. Philology convokes different moments of disciplinary
history, different conceptions of scholarly method, and different relations to aca-
demic institutionality and makes the difference available for reflection and argu-
ment. As the contributors to the New Philology volume make clear, these differences
can be torqued against one another, to advocate disciplinary change. In the latter
part of this essay, I turn to the role of philology in the aftermath of the linguistic
turn to suggest why we might want to explore anew its configuring of language
and disciplinarity.
Turning Away from the Linguistic Turn

Since the start of the twenty-first century, consensus has grown that the linguistic
turn is over.63 Some of its key ideas have become commonplace, part of the mental
furniture of the discipline; others now sound pass, overblown, or wrong. The
solidity of the post-Saussurean analogy between linguistics, literary interpretation,
and social analysis has broken down, and the tendentiousness of the homologiza-
tion now seems clear. Plenty of things do not operate like languageor, to take
the poststructuralist tack, do not fail as language fails. In 2007, historian Michael
S. Roth wrote what might be the most quotable account of this state of affairs:
The massive tide of language that connected analytic philosophy with
pragmatism, anthropology with social history, philosophy of science
with deconstruction, has receded; we are now able to look across the sand
to see what might be worth salvaging before the next waves of theory and
research begin to pound the shore. As language recedes there is much
of talk of ethics, but also intensity; of postcolonialism, but also empire;
of the sacred, but also cosmopolitanism; of trauma, but also animals.64
63 For instance, Roth writes in 2007, For the last decade or so, recognition has been spreading
that the linguistic turn that had motivated much advanced work in the humanities is over;
Roth, Ebb Tide, 66. Nealon writes in 2012, over the past fifteen years or so, theres been a
slow but decisive turn away from the linguistic turn in the North American academic world;
Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, 147.
64 Roth, Ebb Tide, 66. Spiegel quotes from Roths review in Reflections on The New Philology;
I found my way to it via Partner, Narrative Persistence.

Roth and others have characterized the present in terms of its eclecticism: schol-
ars are groping and scavenging in the detritus of the linguistic turn, searching
for what comes next. Nancy Partner, also a historian, judges that these efforts
tend to share a common desire to escape language, restore a pure and immedi-
ate connection with the past or at least some central aspect of experience, and
generally deny the power of language to contaminate history with its own
uncontrollable meanings.65
Literary studies occupies an awkward position within this turn away from
the linguistic turn. There have been attempts within the field to embrace the turn
away, for instance, in calls to discount, as Partner puts it, the contamination of
literature with uncontrollable meanings and to focus instead on what seems
self-evident and intended.66 What does criticism look like, scholars are asking,
if literature has no secret?67 Another response has been to take up non-human
entities as topics of study, with the aim of displacing language and representa-
tion from the centre of ones analytic. As productive as these endeavours have
been in individual cases, there is something self-defeating about them as field-
wide responses to the end of the linguistic turn. To valourize obviousness and
to seek to escape language makes it difficult to hone and reform the practices of
textual construal and hermeneutics that have long been at the heart of literary
studies. To be sure, not everything is a text, and using the tools of linguistic and
literary analysis on what is not language entails latent and often unwarranted
claims. But what about literature? The current task for literary studies lies, I
think, in generating answers to questions like the following. In an intellectual
climate that seeks to mark the limits of language, when not everything is a text,
what does it mean to read texts and interpret them? How might we, within our
interpretive practices, attest to the boundedness, the special case, of language?
What broadened set of techniques and claims will help us do so?
Since 1990, many commentators have turned to philology in negotiating such
questions. The term seems to be good to conjure with, often coupled with defamil-
iarizing qualifiersrecycled philology, cosmopolitical philology, post-philol-
ogy, disjunctive philology, radical philology, future philology, liberation
65 Partner, Narrative Persistence, 82.

66 I refer to rallying cries for surface reading, the descriptive turn, reading with the grain,
and just reading.
67 An acute and generative engagement with such questions can be found in Justice, Adam Usks
Secret.

philology, cosmopolitan philology, philology in a new key, shimmering phi-

lology, post-human philology, wild philology, and world philology.68 There
have been at least two more returns to philology and a re-return, and the
forgotten origins of the modern humanities have been discovered in philology.69
These and other reconsiderations constitute a veritable subgenre that Ziolkowski
has called metaphilology.70 Frances Ferguson begins a 2013 ELH essay by not-
ing that This paper grew, in the first place, from my having noticed a steady
drumbeat in literary studies: a call for a return to philology.71
I think one reason for its ongoing popularity is that philology returns us to
the messy, changeable relationship of our discipline to language. Its definitional
heterogeneity calls for debate about how literary method ought to treat the logos
around which scholarship circles. The archaic flavour of philology in North
American academia continues to defamiliarize it within everyday exchange,
where it vibrates with faint anachronism and raises the question of its untime-
liness. To what is philology antecedent? The answer is productively double. I
have already quoted Nicholss opening words of the special issue: In medieval
studies, philology is the matrix out of which all else springs.72 Yet philology is
also the historical origin of modern language study as such. For both literary
studies and medieval studies, philology acts as predecessor, component part,
and partial synonym. It is a metonymy for each, and in its current reflexive and
meta-pragmatic usage, philology provides a switch-point for thinking about
their relationship to one another. This entwined disciplinary history is one of
the reasons why medievalists might want to hold on to the word as they chart
their course in the contemporary humanities.
In addition to its pertinence to disciplinary self-understanding, a renewal
of philology also has institutional implications. To return to philology, it is not
68 Respectively, Knapp, Recycling Philology; Paulson, For a Cosmopolitical Philology; War-

ren, Post-Philology; Robins, Toward a Disjunctive Philology; Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis;
Pollock, Future Philology? (following Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mllendorff); Dumitrescu,
Bedes Liberation Philology; Horta, Mixing the East with the West; McGann, Philology
in a New Key; Warren, Shimmering Philology; Kay, Post-Human Philology; Naithani,
A Wild Philology; and Pollock, Elman, and Chang, eds., World Philology.
69 Patterson, The Return to Philology; Said, The Return to Philology; Vadde, The Re-Return
to Philology; Turner, Philology.
70 Ziolkowski, Metaphilology.
71 Ferguson, Philology, Literature, Style, 323.

enough merely to speculate about it or to theorize it. Scholars need to be trained,

texts edited, languages learned, literatures interpreted, traditions preserved and
reanimated in order to ensure that what Sheldon Pollock calls the very capac-
ity of human beings to read their pasts, and indeed, their presents can flour-
ish.73 Pollock points out the kind of Pascalian wager that must be made to keep
philology viable:
only once we have acquired the means, through the cultivation of
philology, to access the textuality of the past can we proceed to dis-
pute the value of knowing it. But we would never bother to acquire
the means unless we were already convinced that such knowledge has
intrinsic value.74
If the benefits of philology can only really be recognized after philological train-
ing, then how can the discipline be sustained in times of austerity? The question
is posed in a different form in a 2009 review essay by Simon Gaunt, who sug-
gests that not enough medievalists are accepting the wager described by Pollock.
Surveying recent postcolonial studies of the Middle Ages, Gaunt observes that,
despite its ambitions, much of the scholarship ends up reifying categories that
it sought initially to question, thanks to training within disciplinary structures
that are largely determined by modern national languages.75 Gaunts recom-
mendations for a sufficiently critical medievalism end up sounding their own
call for a return to philology,
for giving higher priority to the traditional skills in which medieval-
ists were trained (in languages, philology, codicology, and paleogra-
phy), since without them we remain hidebound by our own, largely
monolingual, culture, as well as by the scholarship of past genera-
tions, rather than being able to build creatively but securely upon
that scholarship.76
Indeed, one might contrast Gaunts charge to Lee Pattersons recommenda-
tion in the Speculum special issue where he states that Institutionally, a first step
in overcoming the fields marginalization would be to dismantle the barriers

75 Gaunt, Can the Middle Ages Be Postcolonial, 165.
76 Gaunt, Can the Middle Ages Be Postcolonial, 173.

that divide medieval studies from the rest of the human sciences.77 Reading
Pattersons words a quarter-century after their publication, a reader may hesitate.
The neoliberal restructuring of higher education has adroitly dismantled many of
the infrastructures of disciplinary specialization. Adminstrative imperatives and
professional circumstancesenjoining, for instance, shorter timelines on the
completion of graduate degreesmake the acquisition of medieval languages and
of codicological and paleographical skills more difficult. If we consider the erosion
of resources for philological training, then the armature of scholarly techniques78
that once seemed pedantic, reactionary, or bullying suddenly appears fragile and
vulnerable. The point, of course, is not that the contributors to the New Philology
volume were wrong, but rather that they spoke to the particularities of medieval
studies in 1990. Now, as Gaunts and Pollocks remarks suggest, to renew philology
may mean to fight for its renewed specialization, against more general processes
of disciplinary and intellectual homogenization.
Indeed, I would say that any renovatio of philology in the present ought
to encompass pragmatic, critically historicist, and reflexive approaches to the
concept. That is, to return to philology would entail jointly practising philology,
historicizing philology, and theorizing philology. The generative entanglement of
these three modes is well illustrated in the work of medievalists Michelle R. War-
ren and Karla Mallette. The first monographs of both are accomplished models of
recognizably philological scholarship. Warrens History on the Edge: Excalibur
and the Borders of Britain, 1100-1300 considers the significance of Latin, English,
and French Arthurian narratives as they circulated within medieval conflicts
of colonization. Mallettes The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History
draws together the Arabic, Latin, Greek, and various Romance-language tradi-
tions of medieval Sicily (usually studied separately) to construct a story of their
coexistence in the same colonial space. The attention to medieval colonization
that orients both Warrens and Mallettes first monographs becomes in each of
their second books an interest in the colonial legacies of philology itself. In Creole
Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bdiers Middle Ages, Warren places
Bdier, famous medievalist and theorist of textual editing, in the midst of the
nationalism and medievalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Born on the colonial island of Runion, Bdier becomes Warrens entry-point to


the material culture of historicist and geopolitical imagination in the period. Far
from discarding philology because it is entangled with imperialism, Warren uses
it to further the project of a critical historicism emerging from the traditional
methods of philology, turned against the security of origins.79 For her part,
Mallette in European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New
Philology and a Counter-Orientalism brings to light an alternative intellectual
tradition for philology, one that diverges from the nationalism that has loomed
so large in the narrative of its emergence. Mallette demonstrates a fundamental
sympathy with Arab-Islamic culture in the scholarship of a group of Italian
medievalistseven when these philologists were themselves embroiled in colo-
nial projects. Perhaps the books most important contribution is to disaggregate
scholarship from colonialism, not so as to redeem individual philologists, but
to identify what may be worth salvaging from the erudition of a European age
when few were free of complicity in imperialism.
The third approach to philology that Mallette and Warren share is their
ongoing theorization of the concept and practice, opening the term to acts of
speculative redefinition and experimentation.80 They are important voices in the
metaphilological conversation that has been unfolding in literary studies, and
their theorizations are informed by practical knowledge of philological work and
by a densely realized critical historicism. Both have edited or co-edited essay col-
lections on philology. In the disagreements and counter-narratives staged within
these collections, disciplinary self-difference encounters itself. The methods, lega-
cies, dates, definitions, fantasies, and models of intellectual history that constitute
philologys past assume in these collections a socialized form, within which to
seek out what the turn away from the linguistic turn will be a turn towards.81
As Seth Lerer has observed, what many recent returns to philology
have sought to do, wittingly or unwittingly, is to reclaim philology from the
philologists.82 This essay advocates the opposite. In the current moment, when
the priority of language within humanistic enquiry is up for debate and when
formations of disciplinary knowledge have been eroded by pervasive institutional
79 Warren, Creole Medievalism, 222.

80 For instance, Warren, Post-Philology; Warren, Introduction: Relating Philology; Mallette,
Reading Backward; and Mallette, Boustrophedon.
81 Warren, ed., Philology and the Mirage of Time; and Akbari and Mallette, eds., A Sea of
Languages.
82 Lerer, Humanism, Philology and the Medievalist, 511.

change, practising philologists, engaged in the systematic handling of linguistic

and historical alterity, seem best placed to account for its value. What Pollock
calls criticalor hermeneutical or reflexivephilology demands self-aware
enquiry into the disciplines histories and its futures, but it also requires the
Pascalian wager of praxis.83 Scholarship such as Warrens and Mallettes sug-
gests why philology in all its untidy, self-divided historicity might be worth
savingbecause although literary works, the techniques of studying them, and
the justifications for doing so all come into being within history, in the midst
of intellectual and institutional and ethical limitations, nonetheless the task of
making sense of texts remains pressing. The renewal of philology is ongoing.
University of Chicago
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http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/flor.32.007 - Julie Orlemanski <julieorlemanski@uchicago.edu> - Monday, July 17, 2017 9:53:16 AM - IP Address:198.255.239.

Philology and the Turn Away from the Linguistic Turn

Philology is a complicated word, one that condenses in itself the historical

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158 Julie Orlemanski

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4 Spiegel, Reflections on The New Philology, 40.

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160 Julie Orlemanski

might be recuperated to oppose the de-skilling of academic labour. Since 1990,

7 Pollock, Future Philology, 934.

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11 Bloch, New Philology and Old French, 38.

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162 Julie Orlemanski

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sense as a mere ceremonial gesture, 22 I would suggest it is just this rhetorical

22 Graff, Professing Literature, 80.

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164 Julie Orlemanski

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the central tenets of the linguistic turn circulated to literature departments. As

31 See Lee, Talking Heads, 1-15.

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33 Bloch, New Philology and Old French, 38-39 (emphasis original).

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language departments, namely, the relationship between language and literature.

37 Bloch, New Philology and Old French, 38-39.

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39 Kay, Analytical Survey, 298, 296.

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46 Spiegel, History, Historicism, 77.

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170 Julie Orlemanski

for Bate, philology is a periodizing term, coincident with the institutionalization

51 Patterson, On the Margin, 101.

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58 Ziolkowski, Metaphilology, 242-43.

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studying language historically. Philological techniques have been called upon to

Turning Away from the Linguistic Turn

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65 Partner, Narrative Persistence, 82.

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philology, cosmopolitan philology, philology in a new key, shimmering phi-

68 Respectively, Knapp, Recycling Philology; Paulson, For a Cosmopolitical Philology; War-

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enough merely to speculate about it or to theorize it. Scholars need to be trained,

73 Pollock, Future Philology, 935.

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77 Patterson, On the Margin, 104.

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79 Warren, Creole Medievalism, 222.

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change, practising philologists, engaged in the systematic handling of linguistic

83 Pollock, Future Philology, 948.

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