Literary historicism: Romanticism, philologists, and the presence of the past

Modern Language Quarterly

Volumn 65, Issue PART 2, 2004, Pages 221-242

  Leerssen, Joep ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 15244352124     PISSN: 00267929     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00267929-65-2-221     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. The sentiment was proffered by Thomas Case, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Waynflete Professor of Moral Philosophy, on the occasion of the establishment of a modern language curriculum in 1887 (quoted by Charles Harding Firth, Modern Languages at Oxford, 1724-1929 [London: Oxford University Press, 1929], 70-71). Case's pompous conservatism should not distract us from the fact that he was speaking out against a dominant climate of ethnocentric Teutoma-nia-a fixation with and glorification of England's Saxon-Germanic roots. The course that that this fixation was to take, especially in German Germanistik, did indeed amount to "reversing the renaissance."
2. On Pugin and neo-Gothicism in England see Megan Aldrich et al., A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival, ed. Paul Atterbury (New Haven, CT: Vale University Press, 1995)
3. On Viollet-le-Duc and Carcassonne see Bruno Foucart, "Viollet-le-Duc et la restauration, " in Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 1:1615-43
4. On Cologne cathedral see Hugo Borger, ed., Der Kölner Dom im Jahrhundert seiner Vollendung, 3 vols. (Cologne: Museen der Stadt Köln, 1980)
5. and Otto Dann, ed., Religion, Kunst, Vaterland: Der Kölner Dom im 19. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Bachern, 1983)
6. On the Marienburg and its nineteenth-century elevation to a national landmark see Hartmut Boochmann, Die Marienburg im 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Propyläen, 1982)
7. Eichendorff completed his official report Die Wiederherstellung des Schlosses der deutschen Ordensritter zu Marienburg for the Prussian Ministry of Culture in 1844. The completion of Cologne cathedral had been part of his brief as an official in the ministry earlier, especially in 1841-42. See Hans Pörnbacher, "Joseph von Eichendorff und der Kölner Dom, " Kölner Domblatt: Jahrbuch des Zentral-Dombau-Vereins 63 (1998): 265-70
8. See Ann Rigney, "Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans, " Poetics Today (forthcoming)
9. See Ann Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
10. and Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001)
11. I refer, of course, to a famous passage in De Quincey's essay on Pope: "There is, first, the literature of knowledge; and, secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is-to teach; the function of the second is-to move: the first is a rudder; the second, an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy" (quoted in Frederick Burwick, Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001]
12. Michel Foucault, L'archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 32-33
13. For French developments as a case in point see Pirn den Boer, History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818-1914, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Den Boer's study specifically highlights the importance of the historian-statesman François Guizot
14. On Kopitar as librarian, philologist, and European "networker" see Antonia Bernard, "J. Kopitar, lien vivant entre la slavistique et la germanistique, " in Philologiques III: Qu 'est-ce qu 'une littérature nationale? Approches pour une théorie interculturelle du champ littéraire, ed. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1994), 191 - 209
15. Eva-Maria Hüttl-Hubert, "Bartholomäus Kopitar und die Wiener Hofbibliothek, " in Bartholomäus (Jernej) Kopitar: Neue Studien anlässlich seines 150. Todestages, ed. Walter Lukan (Vienna: Böhlau, 1995), 153-220
16. Walter Lukan, Bartholomäus Kopitar (1780 - 1844) und die europäische Wissenschaft im Spiegel seiner Privatbibliothek (Ljubljana: Narodna in Universitetna Knjižnica, 2000)
17. and Jože Pogačnik, Bartholomäus Kopitar: Leben und Werk (Munich: Trofenik, 1978)
18. The most telling example is probably that of Percy, editor of the celebrated Reliques of Ancient English Poetry ( 1777), analyzed in Nick Groom, The Making of Percy's "Reliques" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
19. On Grimm there is a good deal of material but no major scholarly biography. In the absence of one, see the article by Wilhelm Scherer in the old Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, 56 vols. (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1875-1912), 9:678-88
20. Horst Brunner, "Jacob Grimm (1785 -1863), " in Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik in Porträts, ed. Christoph König, Hans-Harald Müller, and Werner Röcke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), 11 - 19
21. Gabriele Seitz, Die Brüder Grimm: Leben, Werk, Zeit (Munich: Winkler, 1984)
22. and Murray B. Peppard, Paths through the Forest: A Biography of the Brothers Grimm (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971 )
23. See also, more specifically, Ulrich Wyss, Die wilde Philologie: Jacob Grimm und der Historismus (Munich: Beck, 1979)
24. and Lothar Bluhm, Die Brüder Grimm und der Beginn der deutschen Philologie: Eine Studie zu Kommunikation and Wissenschaftsbildung im frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Hildesheini: Weidmann, 1997). Both of these works, however, concentrate on the systemic development of a philological discipline in the German context rather than on Grimm's position and role in broader European developments
25. I paraphrase this tenet from Scherer's article on Grimm: "G. erklärte, seinem Lehrer Savigny alle wissenschaftliche Anregung für sein Leben zu danken. Er lernte bei ihm inductive Forschung überhaupt, . . . das Hinausgehen zu den echten und reinen Quellen ... ; er lernte insbesondere historische Betrachtungsweise rechtlicher Institutionen, er lernte-wie man zu sagen pflegt-das Sein aus dem Werden begreifen" (emphasis mine). Ranke's historicism, shared by many historians of his generation, is encapsulated in the aurea dicta that the past should be studied "as it was in itself" (wie es eigentlich gewesen) and that each historical period is unter Gott. autonomous, rather than relative to another period or to the present. I mention a third meaning of historicism only to point out its irrelevance for the present discussion: the fallacy, attacked by Karl Popper in The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), that an understanding of the past allows one to make reliable predictions for the future
26. Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 119. The culmination of Jones's Sanskrit studies was his publication of a legal source edition, Institutes of Hindu Law, in Calcutta in 1794
27. See Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, "Das sinnliche Element des Rechts: Jacob Grimms Sammlung und Beschreibung deutscher Rechtsaltertümer, " in Kasseler Vorträge in Erinnerung an den 200. Geburtstag der Brüder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, ed. Ludwig Denecke (Marburg: Elwert, 1987), 1 - 24
28. For a critical view of the affair of the "Seven of Gōttingen" see Klaus von See, "Jacob Grimm und die Göttinger Protestation von 1837, " in Zur Geschichte und Problematik der Nationalphilologien in Europa: 150 Jahre erste Germanisten versammlung in Frank-Juri am Main (1846-1996), ed. Frank Fürbeth et al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), 277-86
29. Grimm's presidential addresses and interventions are also in his Kleinere Schriften, 8 vols. (Berlin: Dümmler, 1865-90), 7:556-81, esp. 556-63 ("Über die Wechselseitigkeit der drei vertretenen Wissenschaften" )
30. Witness the preface in Francisque Michel, La chanson de Roland el le roman de Roncevaux des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, publiés d'après les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque bodléinne à Oxford et de la Bibliothèque impériale (Paris: Didot, 1869), i-xxx
31. See Otfrid Ehrismann, Das Nibelungenlied in Deutschland: Studien zur Rezeption des Nibelungenlieds von der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Fink, 1975)
32. Friedrich von der Hagen, dedication of Der Nibelungen Lied, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Varrentrapp, 1824), i-ii
33. Karl Lachmann, Zwanzig alte Lieder von den Nibelungen (Berlin: Decker, 1840)
34. Famous for his editions of the Greek New Testament and of various classical authors, Lachmann brought to "serious" German philology the expertise and prestige of scholarship in the classics. In the Nibelungen feud he sided with the Grimms against von der Hagen. On Lachmann see Magdalene Lutz-Hensel, Prinzipien der ersten text-kritischen Editionen mittelhochdeutscher Dichtung: Brüder Grimm-Benecke-Lachmann: Eine methodenkritische Analyse (Berlin: Schmidt, 1975)
35. and Uwe Meves, "Karl Lachmann (1793 - 1851), " in König, Müller, and Röcke, 20-32
36. I offer some thoughts on the subject in "Primitive Orality and Archaic Heroism: The Romantic Conception of Epic, " in Romantična pesnitev: Ob 200. oblelnici rijstva Franceta Prešerna, ed. Marko Juvan (Ljubljana: Univerza v Ljubljana, 2000),
37. Jacob Grimm, "Über das finnische Epos, " in Kleinere Schriften, 2:75. In the original: "Unter den drei dichtungsarten fällt zu beurtheilen keine schwerer als das epos, denn die lyrische poesie aus dem menschlichen herzen selbst aufsteigend wendet sich unmittelbar an unser gemüt und wird aus allen Zeiten zu allen verstanden; die dramatische strebt das vergangne in die empfindungsweise, gleichsam sprache der gegenwart umzusetzen und ist, wo ihr das gelingt, in ihrer Wirkung unfehlbar. ... um die epische poésie aber steht es weit anders, in der Vergangenheit geboren reicht sie aus dieser bis zu uns herüber, ohne ihre eigne natur fahren zu lassen, wir haben, wenn wir sie genieszen wollen, uns in ganz geschwundene umstände zu versetzen." The idea that epic was uncompromisingly archaic, accessible only through the reader's imaginative reaching into the past, was already present in Grimm's above-cited review of 1807, when he criticized as fundamentally misguided von der Hagen's attempts at accommodating the epic in a modernized text for a contemporary readership
38. See Walter Gobbers, "Consciences Leeuw van Viaenderen als historische roman en nationaal epos: Een genrestudie in Europees perspectief, " in Vlaamse literatuur van de negentiende eeuw: Dertien verkenningen, ed. Ada Deprez and Walter Gobbers (Utrecht: HES, 1990), 45-69
39. Fauriel, a close friend of the Italian historical novelist Alessandro Manzoni and later the first (Guizot-appointed) professor of litté rature étrangère at the Sorbonne, worked mainly on the early history of Provençal literature. On his links with Greek ballads and Karadzic see Miodrag Ibrovać, Claude Fauriel et la fortune européenne des poésies populaires grecque et serbe: Etude d'histoire romantique, suivie du Cours de Fauriel professé en Sorbonne (1831-1832) (Paris: Didier, 1966)
40. Grimm's support of Karadžić's endeavors and efforts to secure recognition of them are well known: volume 4 of Kleinere Schriften is full of extensive, laudatory reviews and lengthy excerpts in German. See also Vera Bojić, facob Grimm und Vuk Karadžić: Ein Vergleich ihrer Sprachauffassungen und ihre Zusammenarbeit auf dem Gebiet der serbischen Grammatik (Munich: Sagner, 1977)
41. and Miljan Mojašević, Jacob Grimm und die serbische Literatur und Kultur (Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1997)
42. On Villemarqué, his correspondence with Grimm, and the question of his (and Lönnrot's) editorial integrity, see Jean-Yves Guiomar, "Le Barzaz-Breiz de Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué, " in Nora, 3:3479-3514
43. Bernhard Lauer, Bärbel Plötner, and Donatien Laurent, 'Jacob Grimm und Th. Hersart de la Villemarqué: Ein Briefwechsel aus der Frühzeit der modernen Keltologie, " Jahrbuch der Brüder Grimm-Gesellschaft 1 (1991): 17-83
44. and Gaela Keryell, The Kalevala and the Barzaz-Breiz: The Relativity of the Concept of 'Forgery, '" in Celtica Helsingiensia: Proceedings from a Symposium on Celtic Studies, ed. Anders Ahlqvist et al. (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1996), 57-104
45. I discuss this more fully in "Literary History, Cultural Identity, and Tradition, " in Comparative Literature Now: Theories and Practice/La littérature comparée à l'heureactuelle: Théories et réalisations, ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Milan V. Dimic, with Irene Sywenky (Paris: Champion, 1999), 389-97
46. and in "Women Authors and Literary History, " in Writing the History of Women's Writing: Toward an International Approach: Proceedings of the Colloquium, Amsterdam, 9 - 11 September 1998, ed. Suzan van Dijk, Lia van Gemert, and Sheila Ottway (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2001), 251-57
47. An example of how such an approach to literary history might work in practice is Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660-1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
48. T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, " in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1960), 49
49. See also my "For a Post-Foucanldian Literary History: A Test-Case from the Gaelic Tradition, " Configurations 7 (1999): 227-45
50. Recent initiatives in this direction are exemplified by collections such as Menno Spiering, ed., Nation Building and Writing Literary History (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999)
51. and Joep Leerssen and Marita Mathijsen, eds., Oerteksten: Nationalisme, edilies en canonvorming (Amsterdam: Instituut voor Cultuur en Geschiedenis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2002)