The Word and All Things in it

ABSTRACT

The paper argues that the study of language in literature springs from the ancient discipline of philology which, far from having disappeared with the advent of modern theory, persists both in its repressions and in its techniques. It makes this argument in three parts, a polemic bearing on the temporality of philology, and two exercises each of which seeks to illustrate two of these techniques.

KEYWORDS:

• History of philology
• history of linguistics
• temporality and the humanities
• contextually rich description of words in situ

Notes

1 R. H. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (London: Taylor and Francis, 1997), 155–6.

2 The racial hierarchy at the base of Nazi anti-Semitism is informed by a spurious use of philology’s grouping of the languages into Semitic and Indo-European languages, and the positing of an ur-race, the Aryans, who were supposed to have spoken Proto-Indo-European. Jonathan Culler points out in this vein that philology ‘was based on the invention of an Aryan Greece that would serve as origin for modern cultures in Northern Europe. The invention of that Greece involves the rejection or elimination of the idea of Greece’s dependence on Semitic cultures and on Egypt in particular.’ See Jonathan Culler, ‘Anti-foundational philology,’ in On Philology, ed. Jan Ziolkowski (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 51.

3 I make a suggestion concerning the use of a philological view of language in Modern Languages curricula not mortgaged to nationalist assumptions, in Anne Freadman, ‘Fragmented Memory in a Global Age: The Place of Storytelling in Modern Language Curricula,’ Modern Languages Journal 98.1 (2014): 373–85.

4 Michael Holquist, ‘The Place of Philology in an Age of World Literature,’ Neohelicon 38 (2011): 384.

5 Erich Auerbach, ‘Philology and Weltliteratur,’ translated by Edward Said and Maire Said, The Centennial Review 13.1 (Winter 1969): 1.

6 James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 386.

7 Michael Holquist, ‘Why We Should Remember Philology,’ Profession (2002): 78.

8 Edward Said, Introduction to Auerbach, 1.

9 It will be clear in what follows that I mean by ‘literature’ the large sense of ‘letters’, not the narrow aesthetic sense.

10 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter (New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1993).

11 T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

12 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1971), 16, 19.

13 http://mcgregor.continuumbooks.net/media/1/history_outline.pdf, accessed 13 September 2017. Extract from William McGregor, Linguistics: an Introduction (London: Continuum Books, 2009).

14 Andrew Hui, ‘The Many Returns of Philology: A State of the Field Report,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 78.1 (January 2017).

15 Paul de Man ‘The Return to Philology,’ Times Literary Supplement (10 December 1982); Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

16 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: les éditions de Minuit, 1967).

17 Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, translated by Betsy Wing (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999 [1989]), xiv.

18 Stephen Owen, ‘Philology’s discontents: Response,’ in On Philology, ed. Jan Ziolkowski (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 77–8.

19 Wendell Clausen, ‘Philology,' in On Philology, ed. Jan Ziolkowski (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 13.

20 Barbara Johnston, ‘Philology: What is at Stake?’ in Ziolkowski, 29.

21 Calvert Watkins, ‘What is Philology?’ in Ziolkowski, 25.

22 Roberta Frank, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Philologist’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 96.4 (October 1997): 486.

23 William James, The Principles of Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1890), 609–10.

24 Carl Becker, ‘Everyman his own Historian,’ The American Historical Review 37.2 (January 1932): 234. On James Turner’s argument (op.cit.) history grew out of philology; Becker’s argument indirectly confirms this.

25 The following passage is an edited extract from my book in preparation, Holding On and Holding Out: Jewish Diaries from France 1940–1944.

26 This can easily be tested by restating the relevant sentence without this adverb. Note that the translation of déjà into ‘already’ has no effect on this fact.

27 Raymond-Raoul Lambert, Carnet d’un témoin 1940–1943, présenté et annoté par Richard Cohen (Paris: Fayard, 1985), translated by Isabel Best as Diary of a Witness, ed. Richard I. Cohen (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007).

28 Valentin Feldman, Journal de Guerre 1940–1941 (Tours: édition Farrago, 2006).

29 Jacques Biélinky, Un journaliste juif à Paris sous l’Occupation: Journal 1940–1942, texte annoté, établi et présenté par Renée Poznanski (Paris: CERF et CNRS, 1992).

30 The diary is edited together with that of Georges Kohn. See François Montel et Georges Kohn, Journal de Compiègne et de Drancy, présenté et annoté par Serge Klarsfeld (Paris: FFDJF, 1999).

31 François Montel, in Klarsfeld, see above.

32 Saül Castro, Journal, MS, held by the family. I acknowledge with gratitude the generosity of Mme Berthelet – ‘la petite Édith’ – and Franck Berthelet, daughter and grandson of Saül Castro, who have given me access to in Franck Berthelet’s transcription, made for his maîtrise, Témoignage d’un interné juif des camps de Drancy et de Compiègne (août 1941–mars 1942). Université de Paris I – Sorbonne en 1997. The transcription leaves the spelling and punctuation as they were. I have respected this decision.

33 Jean Oppenheimer, Journal de route: 14 mars–9 mai 1945 (Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2006).

34 Editorial note 1, p. 122, identifies Dr DeBenedetti as a long-time companion of Primo Levi. They had met when they were first rounded up, had maintained contact during their internment at Auschwitz-Monowitz, and together wrote a medical report on the conditions in the camp. This is the Leonardo of The Truce (ch 4); see Primo Levi, If This Is A Man and The Truce (London: Abacus, 1987).

35 Hélène Berr, Journal: 1942–1944, preface de Patrick Modiano (Paris: Tallandier, 2008). The Journal of Hélène Berr, translated from the French by David Bellos, with an introduction and an essay by David Bellos and an afterword by Mariette Job (New York: Weinstein Books, 2008). (The published translation is the source of the translated quotations. Minor modifications are marked with*.)

36 I thank Madame Markoff for granting permission to quote from and discuss the diary of Germaine Léon. Jean Léon et Mme Jean Léon, Archives du Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris: DCCCXXIX-1. Jean Léon was deported in March 1942 and did not return.

37 In most contexts, ‘already’ cannot be used with a negative, whereas in French some combinations of ‘pas’ with ‘déjà’ are admissible; in the translation, I have inserted a positive clause to handle this grammatical non-equivalence.

38 Collectif, Le Camp juif de Royallieu-Compiègne 1941–1943 (Paris: Éditions le manuscript, colln. Témoignages de la Shoah, 2007), Annexe 507–30.

39 Primo Levi, If this is a Man (London, Penguin Books, 1979 [The Orion Press, 1960]), ch.5 ‘Our Nights,’ 66.

40 In my book in preparation, I devote some space to a discussion of Castro’s making of these worry-beads and what they represent in his experience of the camp. See Anne Freadman, Holding On and Holding Out, ch.4.

41 Quoted by Frank 513, citing Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255.

42 Ian Balfour, ‘The Philosophy of Philology and the Crisis of Reading: Schlegel, Benjamin, De Man,’ in Philology and its Histories, ed. Sean Gurd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 202.

43 Quoting Benjamin, letter to Adorno, 9 December 1938.

44 Walter Benjamin, ‘Reflections on Humboldt,’ in Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1996), 424.