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I recently read Peter Brooks' "The Strange Case of Paul de Man", NYRB 4/3/2014, which is a review of The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish. Brooks' central argument seems to be that it's unfair to call de Man a fascist thief, because he was really just a charismatic sociopath. But the thing that caught my eye was a reference to an essay by de Man that I hadn't read:

He began teaching Reuben Brower’s famous course in Harvard’s General Education program, “Humanities 6: Introduction to Literature,” which had a transformative effect on his own approach to literature, as he noted in one of his last published essays, “The Return to Philology.”

I was curious about this, because I associate de Man with a movement in literary criticism that removed from American English departments nearly all traces of what I always understood philology to be, namely an old term for linguistic analysis, and especially comparative and historical linguistics as applied to analyzing and understanding texts in dead languages such as Old English and Middle English.

The cited essay is Paul de Man, “The Return to Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, 1986), 3–26, 23.

My own awareness of the critical, even subversive, power of literary instruction does not stem from philosophical allegiances but from a very specific teaching experience. In the 1950s, Bate's colleague at Harvard, Reuben Brower, taught an undergraduate course in General Education entitled "The Interpretation of Literature" (better known on the Harvard campus and in the profession at large as HUM 6) in which many graduate students in English and Comparative Literature served as teaching assistants. […]

Brower […] believed in and effectively conveyed what appears to be an entirely innocuous and pragmatic precept, founded on Richards's "practical criticism." Students, as they began to write on the writings of others, were not to say anything that was not derived from the text they were considering. They were not to make any statements that they could not support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text. They were asked, in other words, to begin by reading texts closely as texts and not to move at once into the general context of human experience or history. Much more humbly or modestly, they were to start out from the bafflement that such singular turns of tone, phrase, and figure were bound to produce in readers attentive enough to notice them and honest enough not to hide their non-understanding behind the screen of received ideas that often passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge.

This very simple rule, surprisingly enough, had far-reaching didactic consequences. I have never known a course by which students were so transformed. […]

The personal experience of Reuben Brower's Humanities 6 was not so different from the impact of theory on the teaching of literature over the past ten or fifteen years. The motives may have been more revolutionary and the terminology was certainly more intimidating. But, in practice, the turn to theory occurred as a return to philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces.

This passage compounded my confusion. It seems to confirm that de Man meant philology to mean more or less what it means to me — but I can't recall ever having read anything in his work that could plausibly be described as "an examination of the structure of language", whether "prior to the meaning it produces" or posterior to it. Perhaps a reader will be able to point me to an example or two.

Meanwhile, this led me to wonder what others have taken philology to mean. And when I looked into it, I discovered that the attested senses are much more diverse than I had thought.

Some dictionary entries, starting with the OED:

1. Love of learning and literature; the branch of knowledge that deals with the historical, linguistic, interpretative, and critical aspects of literature; literary or classical scholarship. Now chiefly U.S.

By the late 19th cent. this general sense had become rare, but it was revived, principally in the United States, in the early 20th cent. For a fuller discussion of this, see A. Morpurgo Davies Hist. Linguistics (1998) 4 i. 22.

2. Chiefly depreciative. Love of talk or argument. Obs.

3. The branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development, and relationships of languages or language families; the historical study of the phonology and morphology of languages; historical linguistics. See also comparative philology at comparative adj. 1b.

This sense has never been current in the United States, and is increasingly rare in British use. Linguistics is now the more usual term for the study of the structure of language, and (often with qualifying adjective, as historical, comparative, etc.) has generally replaced philology.

The American Heritage Dictionary:

n. Literary study or classical scholarship.

n. See historical linguistics.

Wiktionary:

n. The humanistic study of historical linguistics.

The Collaborative International Dictionary of English:

n. Criticism; grammatical learning.

n. The study of language, especially in a philosophical manner and as a science; the investigation of the laws of human speech, the relation of different tongues to one another, and historical development of languages; linguistic science.

n. A treatise on the science of language.

The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia:

n. The love or the study of learning and literature; the investigation of a language and its literature, or of languages and literatures, for the light they cast upon men's character, activity, and history.

Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, 8e édition

(1)PHILOLOGIE. n. f. T. didactique. Science qui, dans son ancienne extension, embrassait toutes les parties des belles-lettres. Cette science encyclopédique ayant vieilli, on tend à substituer à ce terme, dans l'étude des langues, les mots : linguistique, grammaire, critique des textes, grammaire comparée.

Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, neuvième édition

(1)PHILOLOGIE n. f. XVe siècle. Emprunté, par l'intermédiaire du latin, du grec philologia, « amour de la parole », lui-même composé à partir de phileîn, « aimer », et logos, « parole, discours ». 1. Science qui embrasse l'ensemble des disciplines littéraires telles que la grammaire, la poétique, la rhétorique, la critique, etc. Spécialt. Ensemble des travaux de recherche concourant à l'édition critique de textes le plus souvent anciens ; en particulier, étude des différents manuscrits, de leur transmission et de leurs variantes. L'établissement de l'apparat critique d'un texte relève de la philologie. 2. Science ayant pour objet l'étude diachronique et synchronique d'une langue ou d'un groupe de langues, à partir de documents écrits. Philologie grecque, latine. Philologie romane, germanique, sémitique.

If we look at philology texts from 1900 or so, we get a picture that looks exactly like my original idea ("an old term for linguistic analysis, and especially comparative and historical linguistics as applied to analyzing and understanding texts in dead languages") — e.g. Eustace Hamilton Miles, "How to Learn Philology", 1899; Walter William Skeat, "A primer of classical and English philology", 1905.

And if we look at the contents of the first few volumes of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology (1890 onwards), we get a general confirmation of this view, with things like Albert A. Howard, "On the Use of the Perfect Infinitive in Latin with the Force of the Present"; Frederic D. Allen, "Gajus or Gaius?"; Thomas D. Seymour, "On the Homeric Caesura and the Close of the Verse as related to the Expression of Thought"; James B. Greenough, "Accentual Rhythm in Latin"; Richard C. Manning, "On the Omission of the Subject-Accusative of the Infinitive in Ovid"; James B. Greenough, "Early Latin Prosody"; John Henry Wright, "Five Interesting Greek Imperatives".

For another viewpoint, here's Sheldon Pollock, "Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World", Critical Inquiry 2009:

First, what precisely do I mean by philology? It is an accurate index of philology’s fall from grace that most people today have only the vaguest idea what the word means. I have heard it confused with phrenology, and even for those who know better, philology shares something of the disrepute of that nineteenth century pseudoscience. Admittedly, the definition of any discipline has to be provisional in some sense because the discipline itself is supposed to change with the growth of knowledge, and there isn’t any reason why the definition of a discipline should be any neater than the messy world it purports to understand. Still, philologists have not done much to help their cause. An oft-cited definition by a major figure at the foundational moment in the nineteenth century makes philology improbably grand —“the knowledge of what is known” — though this was not much different from the definition offered by Vico in the previous century,for whom philology is the “awareness of peoples’ languages and deeds.” Perhaps in reaction to these claims, a major figure in the twentieth-century twilight, Roman Jakobson, a “Russian philologist,” as he described himself, made the definition improbably modest: philology is “the art of reading slowly.” Most people today, including some I cite in what follows, think of philology either as close reading (the literary critics) or historical-grammatical and textual criticism (the self-described philologists).

What I offer instead as a rough-and-ready working definition at the same time embodies a kind of program, even a challenge: philology is, or should be, the discipline of making sense of texts. It is not the theory of language—that’s linguistics—or the theory of meaning or truth—that’s philosophy—but the theory of textuality as well as the history of textualized meaning.

Update — More here and here.

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