Philology and Global English Studies

Retracings

Suman Gupta

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137537836
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book retraces the formation of modern English Studies by departing from philological scholarship along two lines: in terms of institutional histories and in terms of the separation of literary criticism and linguistics.

Part 1
Philology

1

The Four Nodes of Convergence in Philological Knowledge

Various narratives of the emergence, development, and contemporary condition of English Studies have consistently charted a path away from philology, arguing that philological rationales and worldviews were superseded and gradually forgotten as this area of scholarship and pedagogy, with proliferating divisions and context-specific diversities, came into its own. So, histories of English as an academic discipline, ensconced in institutions of higher education and research in dominant Anglophone centers and in relatively peripheral areas, have traced such a path repeatedly (some are reviewed in Part 2 of this study). With a somewhat different emphasis, accounts of the bifurcation of linguistics and literary study as two more or less parallel and ever more emphatically separate directions of English Studies track a similar departure from philology (retraced in Part 3). At the least as a descriptive strategy, the passages of English Studies are now widely understood both as being rooted in and as having departed from philological scholarship.

Each of these accounts has had to deal with the troubling question “What is philology?” so as to characterize departures – and have generally done so with a sense of irresolution, of not quite settling the matter but doing enough to present arguments plausibly. There are two reasons for this tentativeness. The first has to do specifically with English-speaking circuits and especially English Studies circles. In English, “philology” is often narrowly understood as pre-Saussurean linguistics, or the “science of language” as pursued before general linguistics was formulated. However, in continental Europe, as Otto Jespersen (1922) memorably observed, “philology” is used in a sense which “is often rendered in English by the vague word ‘scholarship,’ meaning thereby the study of the specific culture of one nation” (p. 64). In fact, a vague grasp of the latter sense of philology (broadly as humanistic scholarship) has had some purchase in English, but alongside a firmer subscription to the narrow sense; the relationship of the two senses has been discussed by Haruko Momma (2013, ch. 1), who herself chose a sophisticated version of the narrower sense (discussed later in this study, in Chapter 3). More importantly, however, in Anglophone and especially English Studies circles both senses of philology had, in the course of the twentieth century, gradually passed into a sort of studied silence; the very word “philology” seemed to recede into collective amnesia. This has been oft noted of late, and occasioned intermittent and increasingly frequent calls for a “return to philology” (discussed in the next chapter). James Turner’s (2014) history of philology is possibly the most extensive attempt to renew and inform interest in philology in ordinarily Anglophone circles, with particularly Britain and the United States in view. In scale this is comparable to wide-ranging nineteenth-century surveys of the field (such as Dwight, 1860), rarely produced since in English. Turner takes a broad view of philology as humanistic scholarship, charts a history of scholarship from classical antiquity, and finds departures not just in English Studies – literary and linguistic studies – but in developments across modern humanities and social science disciplines in the Anglophone sphere, thus accounting for the growing silence around philology in the twentieth century therein.

The second reason for tentativeness about defining philology is of broader import: the scope of the term is fuzzy even where it has maintained a continuous and convincing grip on research – usually in institutional spaces devoted to textual genetics and editing, continental European literatures and comparative literature, Classics and medieval studies, studies of the origins and comparative features of languages. Practicing philologists now who try to delineate the knowledge formation often feel that any definition of philology would seem wanting; that, as Sean Gurd avers, philology is always “much more than it appears at any given moment” (2010, p. 1). So, Nikolaus Wegmann understands the “muddled situation of philology” thus: “In its constant, nearly universal success, philology is a complete parallel version of our field. Philology oversteps the bounds of usual categories and partial definitions. Whether literary history or textual criticism, whether literary criticism or media-cultural history, almost everything goes back to philology. To put it crudely: it’s got philology in there, whatever the label says” (Wegmann, 2014, p. 27).

That philology is understood as always being more than can be defined and encompassing more than can be enumerated could be regarded as both its strength and its weakness; in any case, a definitional urge is caught short. Trying to define it in terms of its objects of analytical attention, texts and languages, always seems unsatisfactory. After all, those who profess departure from philology are still putatively engaged with those objects – and their departure cannot be dismissed lightly, even if philologists feel “it’s got philology in there.” The alternative would be to understand it with a view of all the different ways in which philology has been apprehended and practiced at different times, and identifying common denominators: this is what Turner’s (2014) history attempts. That project shows that philology has been engaged from such diverse conceptual directions, and with such expansive and co-optative effect, that the definitional urge is still left befuddled: common denominators prove less than definitive. Turner does make a useful albeit unsuccessful attempt to find coherence in all that is named “philology” – amidst its uncontainable plethora: the limitations and thrust of that attempt are discussed later in this chapter and in the next.

Nevertheless, Turner’s large project is encouraging for this smaller one: it suggests that it is possible to describe (not define) some coherent features for philology in the broad sense (as a humanistic knowledge formation). And it is the broad sense which is pertinent to this study, not the narrower pre-Saussurean “science of language” sense which has dominated in English Studies. Such a description for the purposes of this study need not reckon with all that philology has meant through history; it needs to frame, admittedly riskily and yet with sufficient suggestiveness to enable scholarly testing and discussion, all that philology has coherently meant insofar as departures have been possible. In doing this the domains of English Studies and Anglophone circuits should be kept in view in relation to the wider domains and circuits of philological scholarship, and not seen in isolation. Such a description of the consistency of philology as a knowledge formation is germane to the main arguments of this study, which are as follows. First, that modern English Studies has accounted itself as departing from philology and effectively silenced philology for much of its recent career; and yet, philological preconceptions have persisted in the midst of that silence and remained embedded in its practices. Second, that insofar as English Studies has incorporated proliferating cultural diversities and now seeks to acknowledge its global spread, and attempts to constitute an accommodative and pluralistic global discipline, it is necessary to depart further from philological preconceptions by reckoning with philology explicitly and not silencing it. For both these arguments, a preliminary understanding of the coherent features of philology in the broad sense is necessary. To that end then, instead of a definition of philology (a pithy statement responding to “What is philology?”) this chapter describes certain coherent features of the broad scholarly formation, insofar as those bear upon debates about departures from philology, especially as they resonate in Anglophone circuits and English Studies circles. Naturally, what might apply to English Studies may also apply to studies of other language-defined cultural productions and circulations, in contexts other than the Anglophone.

The preliminary description below therefore draws attention to certain nodes of convergences to grasp the consistency of philology in the broad sense. These nodes are meeting points for various dimensions of philology: classical and historical philology, the philology of text editing and scholarship, comparative philology, philology as base of literary history or literary criticism, ethnographic philology, and so on. To identify these nodes is not to offer anything as stable and constrictive as a definition; philology’s convergence on these nodes gives meaning to philology’s scale and variety and changeability. The nodes in question are not each one thing. Each node is a grouping of formulations and assumptions underlying practices, often somewhat at odds with each other. Philology’s convergence on these nodes does not occur in one way. The nodes are touched on and linked up in ways as various as philology is various, and the linkage of these nodes enables philology to be discernibly philology (as opposed to not-philology) amidst its bewildering scope and variety. The description of such nodes doesn’t tie philology down to the potential ahistoricism that a proposed definition might; the nodes allow instead for a history of philology to be tractable amidst the multiplicity of historiographies. And, finally, articulating the convergences of philology on nodes is least akin to constituting philology as an object of analysis (which is more the province of definitions). These nodes are inferred from debates and practices rather than offered as prescription or circumscription. There are four such nodes, described in the four following sections: fixing the text, origins and genesis, aspiration to unity, and institutional grounding.

Further, each of the nodes can be and have been interrogated in distinctive ways, which are also traced in this chapter. Interrogations of each node of convergence therefore open ways of departing from its conceptual underpinnings and methodological implications. Articulating the nodes and the connections between them conveys the coherence of philology; tracing interrogations of these nodes and departures from them, if linked up, effectively lays out the rationale for departing from philology. Between clarifying the coherence of philology and the rationale of departures from philology it also becomes possible to grasp where philological preconceptions remain embedded in scholarly practices even after ostensible departures in English Studies.

Fixing the Text

The practice of close reading is grounded in philological scholarship, which cultivated close attention to the grammatical features of texts, registering the minutiae of the language of texts – often so as to defer (if not eschew) judgment. The necessity of close reading continues to be widely accepted now, and does not simply imply reading attentively to a necessary or purposive extent. Close reading is regarded as useful in itself, and is understood as the functional heart of humanities scholarship. The most generalized conceptual formulations on literature and language are often premised on persuasive close reading of a selected text or two. Students of modern English Studies might be oblivious of philology but are routinely put through the mill of practicing close reading early in their pedagogic programs, and are expected to demonstrate skills in close reading constantly thereafter. The powerful convention of close reading is conventional because it doesn’t need to be justified; it is accepted a priori.

Unquestioning subscription to close reading derives from its philological basis, where it is one significant way, among others, of fixing the text – of rendering the text objectively stable and repeatable and available, so that textual ambivalences and fluidities can be captured and stilled for scholarly application, and can be regulated as a professional activity. Metaphorically, to be able to look at a text closely, as under a microscope, and chart or pin down its unstable features, one needs to fix it in the way a microscopic sample is mounted on a slide, so as to hold the text still and sharpen the analytical focus on its ambivalences and fluidities.

To convey how close reading and other modes – for close reading is but one of several strategies – of philologically fixing the text work, a provisional base-line definition of “the text” is helpful. So: a text is a scripted composition of signals, symbols, and implicatures which have expressive, affective, and informational functions. Such a definition would be enough for texts to be recognized as such, and to be referred, discussed, and dealt with. But such a definition wouldn’t be enough to guarantee that texts will cohere with the demands made by philology upon texts: that is, cohere with tracking origins and genesis, enable conceptual unity, firm up institutional structures – which are elaborated correlatively below as philology’s other nodes of convergence. To bring texts to serve the demands of philology, recognition of text qua text is not enough. The text has to be fixed as that particular text, be disposed to have object-like fixity and referability which can be focused and refocused. This fixing of an object-like character for a particular text could take two somewhat separate directions, both of which are strongly invested in philology: fixing the abstract particularity of the text (to enable focus on a particular text irrespective of its possibly multiple material forms); fixing the material text (so that the abstractness and materiality of a text are mutually bound, thereby stabilizing its particularity).

In a letter to Theodor Adorno of 1938, Walter Benjamin reflected on his own attention to the “facticity” of textual details, the “philological attitude [which] entails examining the text detail by detail, leading the scholar to fixate magically on the text” (Benjamin, 2003, p. 107), and observed:

The appearance of self-contained facticity that emanates from philological study and casts its spell on the scholar is dispelled according to the degree to which the object is constructed in historical perspective. The lines of perspective in this construction, receding to the vanishing point, converge on our own historical experience. In this way, the object is constructed as a monad. In the monad, the textual detail which was frozen in a mythical rigidity comes alive. (p. 108)

Here Benjamin, in fact, impressionistically conveys the fixing of the text that close reading – a philological attention to details – confers. The metaphors here suggest that Benjamin doesn’t accept that texts are fixable. The philologist’s fixation is a kind of magical act of holding the text firm and the result is that the text becomes mythically rigid. He deploys the philological method only to undermine it by then turning to a historical perspective. For Benjamin, there’s a contrary move between the philological attention to textual detail and the historical perspective on texts (the latter dispels the former). At the same time, though, it is a productive contrariness since the philological fixing sharpens the dispelling move of historical construction; the rigidity conferred by the former enables enlivening through the historical perspective. Insofar as Benjamin fixates on detail he is a philologist who fixes the text, and insofar as he makes the contrary move of historicizing he is not a philologist – he puts philology into perspective and texts become as fluid as history.

The contrary move between philological close reading and putting into historical perspective that Benjamin makes here – and which makes the function of close reading perceptible – is a rare one. The philological account of the relationship between close reading and historicizing (or philosophizing, or criticism) is usually one of continuity. Erich Auerbach’s and Leo Spitzer’s approach to literary history through philology makes for apposite comparison alongside Benjamin’s here. In particular, the process that Spitzer described in his essay “Linguistics and Literary History” (1948) – starting from etymological study to close reading of the individual writer’s stylistics to grasping the “soul” of a specific (ultimately meaning national) literary culture at a historical moment – offers a smooth passage of continuities from close reading to historicizing and thereby obtaining ahistorical knowledge of a specific culture. With Spitzer in mind, Edward Said’s “The Return to Philology” (2004) confirmed a similar chain of philological steps (a “philological circle”) and drew it more explicitly toward humanism at large. For Said too, at the heart of this enterprise is the “close reading of a literary text – a novel, poem, essay, or drama, say – [which] in effect will gradually locate the text in its time as part of a whole network of relationships whose outlines and influence play an informing role in the text” (2004b, p. 62). In brief, close reading engages the instabilities of the text by fixing them – pinning, charting, noting them – and thereby reaches a stabilized understanding of the culture the text is presumptively fixed in.

The salience of close reading is now so powerfully ensconced in the academy that it is seldom questioned or put into perspective. Frank Lentricchia and Andrew Dubois’s edited reader Close Reading (2003), for instance, didn’t actually interrogate the convention itself. In Dubois’s Introduction, the framing argument pushed quickly from accepting its place in “the realm of so-called common sense” toward examining it as a “jargon” (p. 2) in debates between so-called formalists and nonformalists, that is, those who assert the autonomous validity of close reading and those who maintain that contexts determine how texts are understood. Dubois found that actually both sides are aware of contexts and both sides are convinced of close reading. But the philological underpinnings of the gritty core of close reading, the fixing of texts, slips through. More promisingly, Franco Moretti’s proposal of “distant reading” in his “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000) was offered timidly as a way of putting the limits of close reading into perspective: “The United States is the country of close reading, so I don’t expect this idea to be particularly popular” (p. 57). Moretti’s idea was that close reading is only possible for a “small canon,” but an area as broad as world literature demands an expansive approach. “Distant reading” could be that expansive approach, consisting in a synthesis of close readings that exist already after accepting them and without returning to the primary texts again. The basis of close reading, then, was not opened to debate; it was accepted and then built upon in distant reading. A more suggestive challenge to close reading appeared in Peter Middleton’s Distant Reading (2005), which understood the distance as implicit in the contingent nature of reading (poetry, in this instance) amidst everyday life, amidst a density of preoccupations. From this perspective, the fixing of the text that is affirmed in close reading is a paradox: “a specific close reading of a poem is almost always perceived as an approximation to an ideal reading of a poem, although at the same time such an ideal is tacitly admitted to be unattainable” (p. 9). The aspiration to an ideal reading derives from a presumption of a fixed text; in principle, if it can be presumptively fixed it can perhaps be understood completely. Middleton argued that the point of reading amidst the everyday demands more conceptual attention. This kind of distant reading, amidst the everyday, amidst multiple preoccupations, could be thought of as the other of close reading – as casual reading, without the pejoration that attaches to Said’s description of “quick, superficial reading” quoted above. Arguably, the practices of close reading, especially in institutional settings, cannot be put into perspective without acknowledging the pervasiveness of casual reading out there, in everyday life, in the dense generality of receptive circumstances. And putatively, literary texts seldom float up to academic attention, to sustained close readings, without a rite of passage through casual reading. It is possible to apprehend the entire structure of print culture (its history and current regimes) as premised on the casual reading that is barely named in academic forums and treated with contempt. The contempt is arguably expressive of a remnant philological fear about not being able to fix the text, the anxiety of textual fluidity.

Close reading of texts is one of those defining methodological ploys of philology and is asserted consistently in English Studies and other humanities disciplines, even where departure from philological knowledge is espoused and philology appears to be forgotten. But there are other, more obvious ways in which the abstract text (not the material) is fixed as a particular text. Various modes of setting “definitive,” “standardized,” “authoritative,” “final” editions of texts are effectively designed to fix the text and derive from the philological enterprise of text editi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Philology
• Part 2 Institutional Histories
• Part 3 Linguistics and Literary Studies
• Bibliography
• Name and Title Index