Philology, Education, Democracy

Author(s): Rebecca Gould

Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 57-69
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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 Philology, Education, Democracy

REBECCA GOULD

Writing of his twinned awakening in depression-era Chicago to the

­Communist Party and the life of the mind, African American novelist
Richard Wright recalled the “new realms of feeling” acquired during the
cold winter evenings he spent, after hours of backbreaking labor, reading,
or rather devouring, books, for the first time in his life. Thanks to his en-
counters with Dostoevsky, Proust, Stephen Crane, and Gertrude Stein, an
“attitude of watchful wonder” became the new pivot of his life. “Having
no claims upon others,” Wright recollected, “I bent the way the wind blew,
rendering unto my environment that which was my environment’s, and
rendering unto myself that which I felt was mine.”1 During those desolate
Chicago nights, Wright slowly came to feel that the books he read belatedly,
as the world around him struggled to survive, were his patrimony, even as
his social station denied to him the learning they enshrined.
The life of the mind was dangerous for Wright. In part this danger was an
inevitable result of his native country’s long history of racial discrimination,
but the reasons also went beyond specific historical factors. Born in Roxie,
Mississippi, Wright moved to Memphis while still a young child. Every-
where he lived during his childhood, reading was unknown. Reading was
something rich people did, rich people who were mostly white and went to
school. Instead of books, the path to success in Wright’s world was paved by
coins, or, if one were lucky, dollar bills. In his autobiography Wright lament-
ed, “If one aspired at all, it was to be a doctor or a lawyer, a shopkeeper or
a politician.”2 For his fellow townsfolk, the most valued pleasures were rac-
ing with cars, the most cherished experiences were imparted through whis-
key, and the highest prizes were other men’s wives. Such was the fenced-in
world into which one of America’s greatest novelists was born. Not only in
Wright’s scenario is there an evident relation between coming of age as a
writer and experiencing economic deprivation.

Rebecca Gould is assistant professor of Literature at Yale-NUS College. Her work has
­recently ­appeared in Mosaic; Studies in the Novel, Translation and Literature. Journal of
Literary Theory; and ­Culture, Theory, and Critique. Her book manuscript on philology is
titled Philology's Contingent Genealogies.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 46, No. 4, Winter 2012

©2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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 58   Gould

It should come as no surprise that once he was able to receive literary

knowledge in the dark, exhausted hours between work and sleep, Richard
Wright was ambivalent to his inheritance. He decided ultimately against
accepting Remembrance of Things Past into his personal spiritual academy.
In spite of its “subtle but strong prose” and its “vast, delicate, intricate, and
psychological structure . . . of death and decadence,” Proust’s novel stupe-
fied him. Proust’s chronicle of the soul’s ascent through the levels of Pari-
sian infernos crushed Wright with despair. Wright wanted to document his
world as Proust had done, but the “burning example before [his] eyes,” the
specter of the “Negro in America . . . doomed to live in isolation while those
who condemn him seek the basest goals of any people on earth,” convinced
him that he could never generate a Proustian world in words of his own.3
The arrival of Wright’s inheritance was off by a decade, if not a lifetime,
and he did not know how to receive it once it came. It was not that the books
were misdirected or the goods damaged. Rather, he had to find them by
himself, alone, and he did not know where to look. Wright had no training,
no education, no background in literature. His sole expertise lay in the art
of surviving America’s segregated south as a young black male. He taught
himself to write as he taught himself to read: word by word, page by page,
entirely, secretly, alone.
Although Wright’s particular circumstances are unique, his predicament
is more generalizable than many of us would like believe. It is generalizable
with reference to a discipline historically perceived to lay at the foundation
of humanistic inquiry. This discipline is philology, a body of knowledge, a
methodology, and a vocation believed by contemporary consensus to have
nearly died. To the general public, and even to the vast majority of scholars
in the humanities, the term “philology” means little today. In this essay I
briefly explore the reason for philology’s loss of prestige and consider some
paths for its regeneration.
It is commonly believed that philology has died and that little hope of, or
reason for, recovery looms on the horizon. So why invoke philology today?
One reason is that philology helps us to understand, and thus to rewrite,
the histories of the elite knowledge systems that guide intellectual inquiries
past and present. But if this were the only reason to remember philology,
attacks on the discipline launched by, among hosts of other books, Edward
Said’s Orientalism would have consigned it to the realm of merely historical
significance. But in a post-Saidian world, we are still talking about philol-
ogy, increasingly it seems, as time goes by. Indeed, Said himself chose to
write about philology in one of his last, posthumously published, essays.4
Thus there is clearly something to rediscover—or, perhaps, to invent for the
first time—in this elusive disciplinary category.
We will never know what Wright would have thought of philology had
he had the opportunity to know it firsthand. We do know that he had no
such opportunity. The distance between erudition and twentieth-­century

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 Philology, Education, Democracy   59

American literature is key to understanding both Wright’s relation to

­philological knowledge and philological knowledge’s relation to democracy.
Outside America, from the Arab world to South Asia to Europe, the greatest
intellectuals of the twentieth century did encounter philology. They came
away with various impressions of their disciplinary formations, but all were
shaped irrevocably by this dying knowledge form. From the founder of
modern-day Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal, who trained in Cambridge under
the Persianist Edward Brown, to the blind Arab intellectual Taha Huseyn,
who rediscovered classical Arabic literature through his training at the Sor-
bonne, to European writers such as Nietzsche, Gramsci, and Joyce, hardly
any major non-American writer survived the twentieth century without in
some form encountering philology.
Access to learning carried a heavy price for Wright: the gift came too
late. The more he read, the more he discovered how much had been denied
him, by virtue of his race, his class, his station in life; how broken had been
his experience of the world; and how limited his horizons. Learning was a
mixed blessing. “Having been thrust out of the world because of my race,”
Wright reflected for the first time in his life, “I had accepted my destiny by
not being curious about what shaped it.”5 Every scintillating page stimu-
lated new kinds of pain. Reading Dostoevsky was suicide. Wright became
angry, bitter, and resentful, not only of individuals but also of the entire
social structure into which he had been thrust, of his country, and of the
universe. He joined the Communist Party, until that too disillusioned him.
Then he wrote a novel, an American classic, about a black man who mur-
ders a white woman.
Anyone who has existed on the other side of learning where philology
normally fears to tread knows the pain Wright speaks of, that sense of having
been denied a rightful inheritance, and the strange shadow this denial casts
over the gifts one has acquired. In most societies, though not all, learning has
been seen as the rightful inheritance of the wealthy and socially privileged.
Notwithstanding its nominal embrace of democracy, modern America is no
exception. In many societies also, particularly in modern ones, intellectuals
have seen it as their task to call into question this interdependency of learn-
ing on social status and power. But what is the task of the intellectual in a
society where this alignment is vanishing, even as social hierarchies remain
in place? Where wealth carries no promise of education, but where poverty
is as rampant as ever, social conditions still determine life possibilities, and
worlds of inequality haunt the struggle for social justice? Does the fact that
access to learning has increasingly less to do with social origins not spell
liberation of a certain sort, liberation from the inequalities against which
Wright protested?
It almost seems banal to note that one consequence of late modernity
has been to liberate the acquisition of knowledge from social rank. Redun-
dant too is the observation that the democratization of learning facilitated

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 60   Gould

by the Internet and other advances in electronic technology has facilitated a

decline in the skills of close reading that used to undergird philology. From
this perspective, the association of philology with a politically progressive
agenda would be self-contradictory. How can an elite knowledge form con-
tribute to the democratization of higher education, especially when, as often
seems, modern concepts of democratic learning are premised on philology’s
demise?
As a form of knowledge, philology has seen better days, though perhaps
never in America. Its recent death has been announced—sometimes as in
lament, sometimes in celebration—by administrators and classicists, by
professors of many subjects writing from many different disciplinary loca-
tions.6 These alternating choruses of lament and celebration ask us to recon-
sider philology’s destiny. What is philology’s future in a world struggling to
be free of social inequalities and to serve those who taste the sweetness of
learning as a fruit stolen from a forbidden tree, too late, under all the wrong
conditions, not as their birthrights, but through acts of violation? What can
philology mean for those who know too well that the world distributes its
gifts unevenly, and for whom this uneven distribution calls for a disciplin-
ary response? What is classical learning to those who fight for a world offer-
ing equal access to knowledge? It is well known that, historically, philology
has done little to accelerate the democratization of knowledge. It may be
argued that the discipline has inhibited such equalization. What, then, do
we do when invocations of philology stir yearnings for tradition, even and
especially for those who never possessed these bounties, as in the case of
Wright, seventy years ago?
In the fall of 2009 I had the opportunity to pose these questions in a
classroom context. I was assigned to teach in Literature Humanities, a two-
semester sequence that serves as the foundation of Columbia University’s
Core Curriculum. Columbia’s Core is the oldest Great Books program in the
United States, founded by educator and literary scholar John Erskine during
the very same decade when Wright created his twilight society of writers
after a daylong routine of backbreaking labor in Depression-era Chicago.
Not long after creating Columbia’s Core, Erskine moved from Columbia to
the University of Chicago to establish a program similar to Columbia’s. St.
John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and other liberal arts institutions
soon followed suit. Decades later, Harvard University added its own ver-
sion of the Core Curriculum.
New Yorker film critic David Denby memorialized Columbia’s Literature
Humanities fifteen years ago when he returned to his alma mater as a forty-
eight-year-old seasoned critic and revisited the classic texts he had read as a
college freshman. Denby’s return to the classics resulted in the best-selling
contribution to the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s: Great Books: My
Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of
the Western World (1996). This book argued for the permanent significance

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 Philology, Education, Democracy   61

of the Western canon to humanities-based educations. Great Books joined

­Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994)
in attempting to consolidate a Western canon that had come under fire for
its supposed ossification. More recently, and with less ideological and more
purely literary intentions, Edward Mendelson published a series of reflec-
tions on the European novel, The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Nov-
els Have to Say about the Stages of Life (2006). This last work emerged from his
decades of experience teaching Literature Humanities at Columbia.7
In my class of twenty-two students, five had spent years studying Latin
in private schools. They arrived already initiated into the Trojan Wars, Ho-
meric and Virgilian ekphrasis, the pantheon of Greek and Roman gods, and
the fall of the Roman Republic. The linguistic backgrounds of this privately
educated contingent, particularly in ancient languages, were remarkable:
Latin, in many cases Greek, in other cases Hebrew. Not all students were so
well educated. Students who came from outside the United States, from Ko-
rea, Japan, China, had little if any background in the European and classical
tradition. (The heavily Western orientation of the curriculum prevented me
from discovering what these students from Asia knew about Asian litera-
tures.) The combination of these three groups—foreign students, and pri-
vately and publicly educated Americans—together in a classroom offered
a perfect opportunity to probe the usefulness of philological knowledge
in the contemporary world, to identify the relation between learning and
privilege, and to see whether the students who had backgrounds in classical
learning had an advantage over those who did not.
We read Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Euripides,
­Aristophanes, Virgil, Ovid, and Augustine. The results were unexpected.
There were textual issues that philologically trained students alone could
address. These remained elusive to nonclassical readers. The privately edu-
cated American students brought their copies of Greek and Latin originals
to class to measure against the translation we read in class. They suggested
intertextual linkages. They spoke intelligently about lapses in translation.
Their ability to summon from memory entire inventories of Greek and
­Roman theodicies marked them off from the other two constituencies in the
classroom.
The superiority of the philologically trained students did not pertain to
every aspect of the textual encounter, however. American students from
public schools and students from outside America surpassed their privately
schooled counterparts in forging links between past and present. Students
from public schools probed the relevance of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid to the
contemporary world. Students with nonclassical educations compared the
Trojan War to Vietnam; the staid affection of Menelaus for his wife, Helen
(who had cheated on him with Paris), to marriage in American suburbia;
and fatherless Telemachus to the orphaned Barack Obama, trying to find a
place for himself in the world. Students who had never studied ­philology

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 62   Gould

also made the most probing and reflective statements concerning the
­relation between nomos and physis (culture and nature) in Herodotus, the
paradoxes of mortality in the Iliad, and the perplexing fact that in all
the ancient Greek texts we read, none of the gods knew the meaning of
love, whether as eros, philia, or agape. The privately schooled students
had little to add to our discussions of Thucydides’s views on power and
Aristophanes’s representations of women. For them, the Greek and Latin
texts we read were exercises in linguistic analysis, not documents in the
history of their lives.
Although no systematic inquiry was conducted, a few things can be
­inferred even from this limited and unscientific sample. As important as
philological training is to forming students in their early years, knowledge
of classical languages does not suffice to stimulate intellectual inquiry. None
of the erstwhile intellectuals in my class—and, as one would expect from a
class of freshmen, there were at most two or three students in whose falter-
ing observations one could glimpse intimations of future brilliance—had
background in philology. This does not mean that the skills entailed in phi-
lology, particularly closer reading and care for language, were null values in
their educations. While the publicly schooled students had no formal philo-
logical training, their minds strove continually toward insights that philol-
ogy alone could render articulate. Less sophisticated but more passionate,
these public school students generalized about love, law, war, and hate in
Homer, Aeschylus, and the Bible, without knowing what words their au-
thors used to describe these realms of feeling and what these words meant
in ancient contexts. Partly due to their ignorance, their readings risked ba-
nality. As for the students who rested content with their seeming originality
without activating the philological dimensions of the texts they read, their
intellects were stunted. Most worrying, however, is not the fact that the pub-
licly schooled students had no encounter with philology in their high school
years, but that in an age that has come to regard philology as dispensable,
even entering a university was no guarantee that these students would ever
acquire a philological education.
Until the equalization of access to philology is achieved, humanities
education will consist of two separate social-cultural and economic-politi-
cal spheres. The privately educated will parse Latin verbs in ignorance of
deeper textual meanings, while the publicly schooled will lack the skills to
decipher them. The latter condition is even more disturbing than the first:
not that talented students will not become acquainted with certain method-
ologies and disciplines, but that they will never realize what they should
have known and what they should have been exposed to. In part this is be-
cause these students are given to believe that philology is synonymous with
the study of Western civilization. But while the Harold Blooms and David
Denbys of the world fight valiantly for the Western canon, their readers do
not realize that the idol they have sanctified under this heading is at best a

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 Philology, Education, Democracy   63

crude distortion of a much richer set of archives with greater potential for
changing peoples’ lives and altering our grasp of the world.
How did we arrive at an impasse where the death of philology is fore-
casted and lamented on all sides? Michael Holquist, past president of the
Modern Language Association (MLA), offered one searching answer to this
question in his 2000 inaugural address to members of the discipline.8 Re-
ferring to the unacknowledged dependency of modern literary studies on
philology, Holquist declared that members of the MLA belong to “a profes-
sion that cannot say its name.” More recently, the Indologist Sheldon Pol-
lock argued that philology is more “misunderstood, disdained, and threat-
ened” than any other discipline in the contemporary university. Among the
causes for philology’s demise, Pollock cites “incapacity in foreign languages
. . . worldwide, the shallow presentism of [contemporary] scholarship and
even antipathy to the past as such.”9 While proposing a return to the literary
canon different from that charted by the proponents of philology, William
M. Chace laments that terms like “core knowledge and foundational experi-
ence only trigger acrimony.”10 Each of these modern proponents of various
returns to philology ruminates over the decline of the discipline and charts a
path beyond the current stagnation. All three advocate a return to past ways
of processing textual meaning and seek to battle against the ossification of
the old methodologies, while acknowledging the untimeliness, and in cer-
tain cases the futility, of their endeavors.
For Holquist, Pollock, and Chace, their discipline is either dying or is
­already a corpse. These scholarly lamentations prompt the wish to know
what exactly it is that we are said to be losing. Each scholar answers the
question differently: for Holquist, philology means access to a European
tradition, and, only secondarily, to a classical Greco-Roman tradition.11 For
Pollock, writing as an Indologist, contemporary philology means moving
beyond the Western canon. Chace’s pedagogical proposal is premised on
a largely English-language canon. Although the centers of gravity within
each scholar’s narrative of the fate of contemporary literary knowledge
differ in particulars, their accounts are structurally united: their narratives
all envision a return to a lost condition. It is therefore necessary to ask to
what world each scholar wishes to return us to and to note the dependen-
cies of their ideals for the future of their discipline on their own educational
formations.
Holquist, Pollock, and Chace each have deep and long-term knowledge
of the epicenters of academic power. Their accounts of philology’s potenti-
alities are informed by their firsthand experience of administrative struc-
tures within the academy. This may help to explain why the institutional
basis for philology—its dependency on hosts of bureaucracies, and on all
the political compromises that financial stability within such matrices im-
plies—is assumed rather than problematized by these scholars. Without dis-
senting from their laments, I would like to call attention to one issue their

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 64   Gould

a­ ccounts do not pose. Philology is not only an intellectual exercise; it also has
been—and, so long as it survives, will continue to be—an institution. Philol-
ogy will be an institution in a world where universities depend on corporate
money and tuition more than on any other source of funding. To point out
the problem of philology’s institutional status, of its historically problem-
atic relationship with power, is not merely to revive the Culture Wars of the
1990s. It is rather to revive an ethos of critically examining the sociopoliti-
cal foundations of intellectual power, fostered by Iqbal and Taha Huseyn,
­Richard Wright and Antonio Gramsci.
What does knowledge look like outside the academy? How is it received
by those who did not come to learning through formal education? For the
vast majority of the world’s inhabitants, philology’s demise is a nonevent.
Many contemporary readers who might in other circumstances have be-
come passionate philologists have no way to connect with a discipline that
was silently omitted from their education. When any of these latecomers
approach the recent calls for returns to philology with complicated longing,
it will strike them that the impassioned articulations are tinged with class
privilege. This is not to say that the proposals are invalid; instead it is to
claim that the proposed disciplinary revivals are not universally available
in equal measures for everyone. This makes the contemporary nostalgia for
philology in certain of its registers a strangely skewed phenomenon, oblivi-
ous and self-enclosed. The contemporary revival of philology is largely
confined to the academy. But for those who entered the world of learning
from outside this domain, it makes little sense to limit knowledge to a single
profession. The recent calls for a return to philology insufficiently critique
philology’s class foundations.12 They do not inquire into the existing rela-
tions between philology and privilege and philology and power.
Another writer who tasted the bitterness of learning belatedly and
­during the same years when Richard Wright learned to read in economical-
ly depressed Chicago was the Italian Marxist theorist and activist ­Antonio
­Gramsci. Gramsci was imprisoned in 1926 at the age of thirty-five, the same
age when his idol and spiritual mentor, Dante, began to write his ­Commedia.
Only in the midst of incarceration was Gramsci able to devote himself un-
remittingly to learning. Tragically, when Gramsci finally had the leisure
for reading, most books were forbidden to him and everything had to pass
through the hands of the censor. Gramsci passed the decade of his incar-
ceration by committing his deepest thoughts to his notebooks. Among other
subjects, he explored the relation between philology, a discipline he admired
from a distance, and the “philosophy of praxis,” a Gramscian code word for
Marxism, crafted to evade the prison censors. “The basic innovation intro-
duced by the philosophy of praxis into the science of politics and history is
the demonstration that there is no abstract ‘human nature,’” Gramsci wrote;
“human nature is the ensemble of historically determined social relations.

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 Philology, Education, Democracy   65

It is a ­historical fact which can be ascertained, within certain limits, by the

methods of philology and criticism.”13
Gramscian Marxism required philology to establish the historicity of
the human, just as philology required Gramscian Marxism to determine
the conditions of human meaning. Gramsci learned more than is com-
monly acknowledged from his predecessor in the field of democratic criti-
cism, the great eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher and philologist
­Giambattista Vico. For Vico, the cultivation of philology means the acquisi-
tion of an awareness of one’s creaturehood and of one’s fallibility. For Vico
and Gramsci, philology means the discovery of historical contingency. The
intellectual, the true philologist in the Gramscian schema, is ready to per-
form an inventory on his or her self and his or her culture. This person will
critically examine every detail, every form of power, and every textual and
nontextual nuance that enters into his or her identity. Gramscian philol-
ogy is intrinsically democratic. It is a necessary stage in the process of po-
litical liberation, although the philological moment transpires within every
individual on scales so minute that they go unrecorded in the writings of
more public and more powerful intellectuals, such as Gramsci’s nemesis,
­Benedetto Croce. It is no coincidence that Gramsci accused Croce time and
again of faulty philology.
That Gramsci enlisted philology in the Marxist endeavor to transform
­society and restore the proletariat to a condition of hegemony and critical
consciousness does not mean the Italian political activist was ever a phi-
lologist in the formal, disciplinary, and professional sense. The philologi-
cal vocation could not have been more alien to someone of Gramsci’s class
background. Rather than interpret the above citation from his notebooks as
the yearning of a would-be philologist prevented from pursuing his voca-
tion by the fact of his incarceration, it is perhaps closer to the texture of
Gramsci’s own life and political commitments to see the Italian Marxist’s
“failure” to become a philologist as a condition of his modernity and as a
predicament faced by countless twentieth-century intellectuals born into
poverty and committed to the liberation of the working class.
Historically, philology is the domain of the elite. Gramsci could not have
participated in the discipline even had he wished to do so. Under the con-
ditions of the world he inhabited, given the socioeconomic restrictions he
faced, philology was not an option for Gramsci. Related forms of erudition
were likewise closed to America’s greatest African American novelists: Rich-
ard Wright, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin. During his aborted col-
lege years, Gramsci lacked the economic resources to support his studies on
the meager stipend offered him by Naples University. Later, the convictions
acquired through his sociohistorical formation prevented Gramsci from
claiming the discipline as his own. Although he was filled with regret for
not having spent more time with classical languages, those who ­understand

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 66   Gould

that Gramsci’s intellect was forged in the crucible of political necessity know
that the Italian activist would have refused the path of the philologist had
he been given the chance to do things differently.
Richard Wright was “thrust out of the world” by virtue of his race and
only later learned to make sense of his paradoxical position. W. H. Auden
famously noted that Ireland “hurt” W. B. Yeats into his vocation, poetry. So
too did poverty “hurt” Antonio Gramsci into activism. It was not merely
a decade in prison that prevented Gramsci from fulfilling his dream of be-
coming a philologist. More fundamental to this process was his irrevocable
historical conditioning. This point needs to be stressed so that we don’t fool
ourselves into believing that access to philology has ever existed equally for
everyone, or that it does so today. Not everyone who wants to become a phi-
lologist can become one. The reasons behind this socioeconomic restriction
have much to do with philology’s failure, or perhaps incapacity, to remake
the world in the image of the democratic knowledge that Gramsci and other
Marxist intellectuals stood for.
Although the American example is typical, it is not universal. Not all
­societies conflated access to knowledge with elevated social status. Long
before European modernity inaugurated a seemingly new egalitarianism,
the medieval Islamic social welfare system ensured that students who
couldn’t afford to pay for high-quality educations received stipends from
public funds called waqf (pl. awqaf). In such societies, the discipline of philol-
ogy was not as polarized according to class lines as in modern Europe and
America. An African writer such as al-Jahiz (d. 983) could earn a living in
his adopted city, Baghdad, from his book on animals and his sketches of dai-
ly life while reserving his nights for philological explorations. Al-Jahiz was
fortunate never to have tasted the bitterness of Richard Wright’s discovery
of a world of books, because access to learning was not as contingent on
economic class in tenth-century Baghdad as in twentieth-century America.
We do not inhabit al-Jahiz’s world. Our limitations more closely mirror
those faced by Gramsci, Wright, and other intellectuals born to poverty. By
contrast, philology is practiced largely by those for whom learning is in-
scribed in their socioeconomic origins. Even today there is remarkably little
interest in viewing philology from the other side of learning, outside the
hallowed walls of class privilege. Were the voices of all those who have been
prevented from claiming philology as their inheritance heard, the discipline
itself would be transformed. Even more than a revival of classical languages
for their own sakes, a demographic reconfiguration should be high on the
agenda of any intellectual program for philology’s rebirth. History, anthro-
pology, and sociology have all managed to justify themselves to nonaca-
demic constituencies. Philology, by contrast, has done nothing to speak out-
side the academy. Microscopic histories of philology abound, but these texts
seem to have been written exclusively for the converted.14 In the moribund
discipline of philology, nothing approximates the maverick explorations of

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 Philology, Education, Democracy   67

Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard, Clifford Geertz, Natalie

Zemon-Davis, and so many others that have transformed history and the
social sciences.
Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1953) was perhaps the last great exercise in
philological inquiry.15 Apart from such exceptions, the discipline has of-
fered nothing conceptually challenging in the past century. Mimesis was
published over a half century ago. To understand what has happened to
philology after Mimesis, we only need to compare the riveting ecstasies that
inform Auerbach’s rediscoveries of Dante, Boccaccio, and Cervantes to the
normative closures and the canonical anxieties and exclusions that haunt
Bloom’s The Western Canon. Auerbach teaches that there is always more to
the European tradition than can be contained within the space of a single
book. Bloom implies that the would-be intellectual may confine his or her
reading to his Western canon. Bloom opens his work by declaring his in-
tention to isolate the qualities that made the canonical twenty-six authors
he has chosen “authoritative in our culture,”16 as though literary vales were
mere reflexes engendered by the ethnic belonging implied in the pronoun
“our.” If the ideal reader does not stray from the authoritative list conjured
ex cathedra by the magisterial critic, Bloom seems to promise, the mastery
of the Western canon will lie within his or her grasp. What Bloom does not
mention, but what many of his critics have perceived, is that the mastery
the critic unreflectively celebrates is informed by the ethnic hierarchies and
class prejudices that licensed colonialism and that continue to this day to li-
cense the neglect of literatures outside the European canon. Insofar as it con-
tributed to the consolidation of European literary culture across centuries of
Latin, Greek, and vernacular learning, Bloomian appeals to the conservative
force of canonicity forms one indispensible if lamentable chapter in philol-
ogy’s history. Rather than suppress this history, one task for a philology of
the future is to distinguish itself from canonicity as a self-sufficient value
and to intertwine narratives of racial, ethnic, and other kinds of difference
into the discipline’s identity.
The regnant narrations of philology’s history resemble Bloom’s canon in
that they transpire largely in the register of nostalgia. The two classic stud-
ies, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff’s Geschichte der Philologie (1921)
and Rudolph Pfeiffer’s History of Classical Scholarship (1968), tell of their dis-
cipline from the perspective of the cultivated and privileged insider. Not-
withstanding their value as documents in a certain kind of social history,
such narrations risk reducing philology to a class marker, on the level with
traveling and fine wine, a sophisticated sign of cultivation rather than a ba-
sic human necessity. Philology is clearly a privilege in the positive sense that
it gives the reader access to texts that cannot be understood in any other
context and in that it intensifies our ability to engage those aspects of an-
cient and medieval civilizations that resist and confound translation. Philol-
ogy is a privilege in a negative sense as well, as a discipline that consolidates

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 68   Gould

rather than critiques class prejudice. A second task for the philology of the
future is to replace class privilege with democracy.
Beyond being a privilege, philology is, by Gramscian and Vician ac-
counts, a necessity. Philology enables us to face our contingencies, although
a recent survey of the discipline would be likely to conceal this potentiality.
Those who have been granted the inheritance of classical learning find it dif-
ficult to justify their knowledge to a world that lacks what they possess. But
a new generation of intellectuals is being exposed to the classics. This new
generation is entering the classroom and reading for the first time books
that have been read for millennia. This new generation, or at least certain of
its members, needs philology as intensely as ever, perhaps even more than
readers of generations past. Such newcomers do not yet know what philol-
ogy can do for contemporary readers. Because of this new oblivion, many
of the most brilliant students today cannot respond articulately to a text’s
philological dimensions. Countless young students across the world cannot
name their discipline and are unable to identify their vocations. Even in the
absence of an appropriate lexicon, they will eventually discover viscerally
what they are seeking. It is not yet known how they will refer to their new
discipline, forged of new necessities. Will they call it philology? Will this
new philology have any role to play in humanity’s liberation?
When future calls for a return to philology are issued, it is hoped that
they include within themselves, in the spirit of Wright and Gramsci, the pro-
viso that the long-standing dependency of philology on class privilege be
subjected to more thoroughgoing and self-critical scrutiny than the disci-
pline has received. Most particularly, one hopes that philology will assess
the implications of the restriction of its knowledge forms to those who can
afford to attend the few schools in the world where philology is taught and
practiced.17 As long as these institutional hierarchies remain enshrined in
the discipline, as long as economic means determine intellectual options, it
will be quite difficult to distinguish between the philology of the past and
the philology of the future, between philology as liberation and philology as
oppression, and even more difficult to practice such philology in the class-
room, not to mention the world at large.

NOTES

  1. Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 333.
  2. Ibid., 329.
  3. Ibid., 332.
  4. See Edward Said, “The Return to Philology,” in Humanism and Democratic Criti-
cism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 57–84, as well as the intro-
duction to Auerbach’s Mimesis that follows in the same volume.
  5. Wright, Black Boy, 288.

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 Philology, Education, Democracy   69

  6. The American Scholar, Critical Inquiry, and The Proceedings of the Modern Language
Association have often served as venues for such announcement. Gayatri Spiv-
ak’s influential Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)
emerges in part out of these debates.
  7. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1994); David Denby, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer,
Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1996); Edward Mendelson, The Things That Matter: What
Seven Classic Novels Have to Say about the Stages of Life (New York: Pantheon,
2006).
  8. Michael Holquist, “Forgetting our Name, Remembering our Mother,” Proceed-
ings of the Modern Language Association 115, no. 7 (2000): 1975–77.
  9. Sheldon Pollock, “Future Philology: The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World,”
Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2009): 931–61.
10. William M. Chace, “The Decline of the English Department,” American Scholar
78, no. 4 (2009): 32–42.
11. More recently, Holquist has called for “more globalized” forms of philology. See
Holquist, “The Place of Philology in an Age of World Literature,” Neohelicon 38,
no. 3 (2011): 267–87.
12. In addition to the basic texts of Holquist and Pollock cited above, the work of
Sean Gurd also deserves mention. See, for example, Gurd, “On Text-Critical
Melancholy,” Representations 88 (2004): 81–101.
13. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Torino: Einaudi, 1975),
3:1588 (emphasis added).
14. See especially Rudolf Pfeiffer’s History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings
to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) and History of Classical
Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). More recently, see Sean
Gurd, ed., Philology and Its Histories (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2010). Both of these volumes are valuable and instructive; my only point of cri-
tique is that they restrict their discipline to the academy.
15. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.
Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
16. Bloom, Western Canon, 1 (italics added).
17. With respect to the institutional democratization of philology, it is worth men-
tioning Sheldon Pollock’s recent initiative, the Ambedkar Sanskrit Fellowship,
which “supports graduate work in Sanskrit studies for students from historical-
ly disadvantaged communities” by funding five years of graduate study toward
an MA or PhD.

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