Philology and Global English...

Philology and Global English Studies

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Philology and Global English StudiesRetracings

Suman Gupta

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vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part 1 Philology

1 The Four Nodes of Convergence in Philological Knowledge 9 Fixing the Text 13 Origin and Genesis 20 Aspiration to Unity 28 Institutional Grounding 36 In Sum 40

2 Muting of, Return to, and Further Departure from Philology 43

Muted 44 “Greatness” and Reiterated Returns 47 Centering Edward Said 55 Further Departure 62

Part 2 Institutional Histories

3 The Former Heartlands of English Studies 69 United Kingdom 71 The United States of America 83

4 The Former Hinterlands of English Studies 93 Continental “New Europe” 94 India 106 Moving On 117

Part 3 Linguistics and Literary Studies

5 From Philology to General Linguistics and Literary Theory 123 Renewing the Philological “Science of Language” 124 General Linguistics Contra Philology 129 Invigorating Literature via Saussure 139 The Environment of Language Itself 146

6 The Politics of Language Corpora and Literary Theory 150 Phase 1 English Corpora and Liberation from

Literary Texts 150

Contents

Corpus-Based Approaches to Literature 158 The Political Desire of Literary Theory 165

7 Theory Debates and Discourse Analysis 174 Identity Politics and (Literary) Theory 174 The Territorial Anxieties of Linguistics 186 The Political Desire of Discourse Analysis 193

8 Englishes and Global English Studies 202 Conceiving World Englishes 203 Toward Global Englishes and English Studies 213

Bibliography 224

Name and Title Index 245

viii Contents

ix

I am immensely grateful to Deborah Cameron, Ronald Carter, Renate Haas and Steven Tötösy for reading lengthy early drafts of this book, and for their most perceptive criticisms and intellectual support. Without their selfless generosity this book would never have been finished.

Several collaborative projects which I have been involved in have fed this study, especially through workshops in Beijing in 2008 (organized by Zhao Baisheng), in Plovdiv, Veliko Turnovo, Sofia, Cluj and Sibiu 2007–10 (organized by Milena Katsarska, Ludmilla Kostova, Madeleine Danova, Maya Pencheva, Adriana Neagu, Ana-Karina Schneider), in Delhi 2011–14 (organized by Richard Allen, Mohammad Asaduddin, G. J. V. Prasad, Subarno Chattarji), and in London 2007–14. These pro-jects and events were variously funded by the Ferguson Trust, Leverhulme Trust, British Academy, Arts and Humanities Research Council, Open University and Peking University. Further, I am indebted to the organ-izers of several forums where issues which feature below were discussed at length, especially in Munich (organized by Anna-Katharina Krüger and Thomas Erthel), Louvain (organized by Erica Durante) and Delhi (organized by Mohammad Asaduddin) in 2013–14. Participants in these events have contributed to this study variously, and I am grateful to all of them. Visiting appointments at several institutions offered interludes for uninterrupted research and writing: Institute of World Literature, Peking University (2008–09); CRASSH, University of Cambridge (2011); English Department, University of Delhi (2011); Institute of Language and Literature, State University of Campinas (2012); and, especially, Department of Humanities, Roehampton University (2008 onwards). Each extended excellent facilities, and in each I found colleagues with stimulating ideas which have shaped my own. Thanks are due also to all contributors to a Google online discussion forum, ‘Non-Anglophone English Studies’, which I had initiated and moderated in 2011–12.

I am, as always, indebted to my colleagues in the English Department of the Open University for allowing me time and space for research, and providing a most supportive environment. Assessors for and editors of Palgrave Macmillan have made valuable inputs in the final stages of this book; I am particularly grateful to Ben Doyle for his part in publishing this.

Finally and foremost, every argument presented below owes some-thing to conversations with friends. I depend on friends to hone

Acknowledgments

x Acknowledgments

thoughts and test concepts and feel at ease with the world, and the following have been exceptionally forthcoming or forbearing or both: Richard Allen, Zhao Baisheng, Tapan Basu, Subarno Chattarji, Fabio Akcelrud Durão, Ayan-Yue Gupta, Jernej Habjan, Ann Hewings, Milena Katsarska, Mine Özyurt Kiliç, Ludmilla Kostova, Bob Owens, Ana-Karina Schneider, John Seed, Joan Swann, Harish Trivedi, Hrvoje Tutek, Cheng Xiao.

I alone am responsible for errors or misconceptions in this book.

1

Since English is the dominant global language at present, English Studies features significantly in humanistic pedagogy and scholarship worldwide. Of necessity then, English Studies has become a site of sus-tained and ongoing pluralization. The conventional integrities and geo-political centrings of the academic discipline now seem anachronistic. The global purchase of the discipline has been described and examined to some extent already. For instance, James English’s The Global Future of English Studies (2012) gave a useful comparative description of student recruitment figures, career trajectories, and curricular emphases for the discipline in various countries across several continents. From a differ-ent direction, in Globalization and Literature (2009) I had outlined how globalization is represented in and acts upon literature, primarily with the Anglophone circuit in mind and with specific reference to English Studies. However, while such accounts confirm the global purchase of English Studies, what that means for the discipline is yet indifferently conceptualized. It is clear that in practice English Studies is global but it is unclear whether English Studies is yet conceptualized as global, whether its current diversities and integrities are yet sufficiently embed-ded in pedagogy and scholarship. English Studies is usually still engaged in limited ways: either by deferring to dominant Anglophone cultures, or by focusing on local relevance, or by exploring transactions across preconceived boundaries (North/South, Anglophone/non-Anglophone, colonial/postcolonial, etc.). Naturally, these approaches variously clarify the global scope of the discipline, and yet these do not quite compre-hend the discipline’s global penetrations and pluralistic formation. English Studies always seems to contain more than can be articulated, or every attempt to describe it seems less than its reach.

Introduction

2 Philology and Global English Studies

This study attempts to conceptualize and comprehend the current condition of English Studies in a general way, with its global reach and proliferating diversities in view.

For the purposes of this book English Studies consists primarily in the advanced study of English linguistics and literary analysis of texts in English. “English linguistics” here encompasses all scholarship addressed to the English language and the variegated Anglophone sphere; and “literary analysis of texts in English” is addressed to all available cultural texts in English, including translations from/into English. Naturally English linguistics can only be understood in terms of general linguistics, and literary analysis in English according to the broad remit of literary theory. The focus on English Studies here is underpinned throughout by broader, generalist theoretical considera-tions that attach to linguistics and literary study. So, while this book seeks to clarify particularly the condition of English Studies now, its observations have some bearing on linguistics and literary study for any circuit of languages and texts. Also, the fact that the following is primarily concerned with advanced-level study, typically at university level and beyond, does not mean that it is indifferent to literary and linguistic pursuits beyond academia.

The relationship and balance of linguistics and literary analysis in English Studies is one of the main concerns of this book. Conventionally, in the Anglophone sphere (including colonial contexts) English depart-ments and higher degrees have been primarily devoted to English litera-ture, with English linguistics either a relatively marginalized subsection of the department or a separate discipline with its own department (or space within a Modern Languages department). With global practices of English Studies in view, the situation has become considerably more complex. James English observed:

the major zone of variability among the world’s English departments [is]: the extent to which they incorporate linguistics and language study. There are universities, even entire national systems, where courses in English language study and/or linguistic theory constitute half or more of the required credits for an English baccalaureate degree. And there are other universities in other countries where the English BA curricu-lum is entirely free of all such requirements and where even electives in the field are scarce or non-existent. (2012, p.116)

To understand the condition of global English Studies at an advanced level now it is necessary to explore the institutional and conceptual

Introduction 3

relationship between linguistics and literary analysis. Much of this book is devoted to that, especially in Parts 2 and 3. Other recent accounts of English Studies, which are less concerned with the global scope of the discipline, conceive of several parallel strands in addition to linguistics and literary study. Thus, Bruce McComiskey’s English Studies (2006), which is centered on higher education in the USA, gives parallel space to language teaching, creative writing, rhetoric, and composition, and argues for “reimagining English Studies as a coherent community of disciplines” (p. 41). With the global scope in view, however, the broad areas of linguistics and literary study are still centered at an advanced level, and the other strands are conceived as variously derived from or supplemental to those. In the argument presented below, the rela-tionship and disjuncture between linguistics and literary study bears substantially upon the discipline’s institutional development and across sub- specializations. This argument is about the underpinning concepts of English Studies – in English linguistics and literary analysis of texts in English – and does not consider the applied dimensions of language learning and classroom practices.

To restate, this study seeks to conceptualize the current condition of English Studies in a general way, with its global scope and pluralistic for-mation in view: the natural recourse for this is a historicist method. For such a project, it is expedient to understand how the current condition has come to exist. This study is therefore structured around retracings of the career of English Studies. These are “retracings” rather than “trac-ings” because this is not a straightforwardly historical account of the academic discipline, and it offers little by way of discovering historical sources and delving archives anew. The method here consists in analyz-ing, reconsidering, and synthesizing existing histories and salient con-ceptual moments in the career of English Studies; in brief, this entails reckoning with existing historical accounts and their historiographical assumptions, and discerning progressive patterns in the career of the discipline.

This method calls for the appointment of a retrospective intellectual horizon – a historically resonant concept or project – in relation to which historicist retracings can be undertaken, or with reference to which the gradual emergence of global English Studies can be articu-lated. Philology as a knowledge formation and mode of structuring humanistic scholarship provides such a horizon: that is, in brief, phi-lology as scholarly engagement with texts and languages and cultural formations understood in a joined-up fashion, which was dominant particularly in nineteenth-century institutional settings. Institutional


histories of English Studies have repeatedly charted the career of the discipline from a philological horizon.

The term “philology” is notoriously difficult to define, and the com-plex methodologies and numerous fields of philological scholarship have always tested attempts to delineate its features. This has been particularly so in Anglophone circuits and especially English Studies circles, where the broad connotations of philology have often been apprehended in implausibly narrow ways, and where, by the end of the twentieth century, a muting of philology – a reluctance to talk about philology – was widely evidenced. And yet, even amidst such muting, intermittent calls for a “return to philology” have appeared, with every sign of growing revivalist interest in the twenty-first century. Part 1 of this book, “Philology,” is devoted to conveying both the complexities of and some of the coherent features of such scholarship. This is attempted by outlining conceptual nodes on which diverse areas of philological knowledge converge, rather than by taking recourse to restrictive defini-tions. Four sections of Chapter 1 outline four linked nodes which con-ceptually ground the different dimensions of philological scholarship: fixing the text, normative concepts of origins and genesis, aspiration to unity, and institutional grounding. Despite the above-mentioned historicist accounts of departures from philology in English Studies, it is argued here that the conceptual nodes have both been persuasively interrogated and yet continued to have a tacit hold on scholarly prac-tice. Chapter 2 follows with brief examinations of the manner in which philology came to be silenced in English Studies circles, of calls for returns to and renewals of philology thereafter, and of what a further departure from philology might mean.

This last point, in fact, underscores one of the main contentions of this study as a whole: that the full potential of the global scope and pluralistic formation of English Studies can only be realized by depart-ing further from philology rather than returning to it, by moving firmly away from philological preconceptions which have persisted even as the discipline departed from philology – and that this is possible only by engaging with philology rather than by silencing it.

With the retrospective horizon of philology in view, two lines of his-toricist retracing toward conceptualizing the current condition of global English Studies are taken up respectively in Parts 2 and 3.

Part 2, “Institutional Histories,” examines how historical accounts of the career of English Studies, in several institutional contexts, represent the departure of the discipline from philology. Typically such histories have centered upon specific nation-states, and the coverage here is

Introduction 5

necessarily selective. Chapter 3 traces histories of English Studies in the two dominant Anglophone contexts of the discipline, the UK and USA; and Chapter 4 is devoted to histories of the discipline in continental Europe, covering the post-1990 transnational formation, and in India, where English Studies began as a colonial import. Focusing on these obviously does not do justice to the multiple histories of the discipline with its current global scope. English Studies in Australia and New Zealand, in the Middle East and Far East, in Africa, in South America, and so on, need to be engaged as well for a more comprehensive grasp of global English Studies. That would be a voluminous and protracted project, and a very worthy one. Nevertheless, the limited view here ena-bles some consideration of links, influences, and transactions between different contexts, and conveys some sense of what a full-scale global history of English Studies may find. More importantly, when context-specific histories are juxtaposed thus, the complicated relationship between philology and the current pluralistic and global English Studies is foregrounded and highlighted for renewed attention.

Part 3, “Linguistics and Literary Studies,” follows another line of historicist retracing from philology to global English Studies. Here the emphasis is on the gradual bifurcation of English linguistics and literary studies as separate fields, both departing concurrently from the joined-up scholarly project of philology. The arguments that gradually sharpen the fraught relationship between linguistics and literary analysis are retraced in this part, and the moves that gradually widen their separation from each other are examined. The pluralizations that now characterize both English linguistics and literary studies are traceable through their bifur-cated and distinct journeys away from philology and from each other. Four chapters, Chapters 5 to 8, lay out that double separation – from the horizon of philology and from each other – by taking up broad areas of linguistics (structuralist general linguistics, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, world/global Englishes) and their connections with and resistances to developments in literary study (especially in relation to theory and identity politics). The uneasy balance between linguistics and literary study in institutional English Studies now, with its global scope and pluralism, is clarified to some degree in Part 3; and the extent to which these aspects of English Studies may usefully develop hereafter in a mutually regarding but distinct fashion pondered.

Part 1Philology

9

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 emphati-cally 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 gen-erally 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 linguis-tics, 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

1The Four Nodes of Convergence in Philological Knowledge


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 stud-ies – 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 for-mation often feel that any definition of philology would seem want-ing; 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 con-stant, nearly universal success, philology is a complete parallel version of our field. Philology oversteps the bounds of usual categories and par-tial 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

The Four Nodes of Convergence in Philological Knowledge 11

urge is caught short. Trying to define it in terms of its objects of analyti-cal 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) his-tory 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: com-mon denominators prove less than definitive. Turner does make a use-ful 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 sug-gestiveness 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 philo-logical 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 accom-modative 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 cer-tain 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 edit-ing and scholarship, comparative philology, philology as base of liter-ary 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 ques-tion 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 philo logy 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 philol-ogy 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 phi-lology 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 scholar-ship. 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 demon-strate skills in close reading constantly thereafter. The powerful con-vention 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 philo-logical basis, where it is one significant way, among others, of fi xing the text – of rendering the text objectively stable and repeatable and avail-able, 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 provi-sional 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: fix-ing the abstract particularity of the text (to enable focus on a particular text irrespective of its possibly multiple material forms); fixing the mate-rial 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 philo-logical study and casts its spell on the scholar is dispelled according to the degree to which the object is constructed in historical perspec-tive. 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 turn-ing 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 per-spective. Insofar as Benjamin fixates on detail he is a philologist who fixes the text, and insofar as he makes the contrary move of historiciz-ing 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 (ulti-mately 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) con-firmed 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 non-formalists, 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 return-ing 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 read-ing, 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 read-ing. 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 con-tempt 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 knowl-edge is espoused and philology appears to be forgotten. But there are other, more obvious ways in which the abstract text (not the mate-rial) 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 editing – and continue to have currency. The current modes for such fixing of texts are extrapolations from philological methodology (in the study of Classics and theology): they draw upon methods evolved to, for instance, recover definitive or authoritative texts from available


variants, versions, and fragments, or undergird an existing ideological and institutional formation. The modification of such methods to serve contemporary text production and reception circuits (in print cultures and thereafter audio-visual and digital cultures), is effectively also the conservation of philological practices. Such fixing practices, like that of close reading, appear to be self-validating and simply work amidst academic, publishing, and intellectual property regimes. Relatedly, in the history of print culture – where the replicable codex is the domi-nant material form of texts – the centering of the author as the key to fixing texts is part and parcel of that philological methodology. The authority of authorship (the weight attached to authorial intention) in determining what is a “definitive,” “standardized,” “authoritative,” “final” edition is so deeply entrenched in academic, publishing, and legal regimes that it seems beyond interrogation – even amidst doubts about the concept of authorship. Debates about authorship are detailed later in this chapter (in the section “Origins and Genesis”), so are not immediately glossed here.

At least one of the ways in which Sebastiano Timpanaro’s study, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method (2005 [1981]), illuminated contem-porary (late twentieth century) textual scholarship was by suggesting resonances with philological text editing and textual scholarship from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century (from Erasmus to Richard Bentley to August Wolf to, especially, the emergence of the aggregate set of principles that came to be identified with Karl Lachmann; see Timpanaro, 2005, ch.7). In charting the historical development of these, Timpanaro touched on arguments that resonate strongly with those current not merely in present-day analytical bibliography but in literary and linguistic study generally. Lachmann’s method was regarded in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe as the most authoritative synthesis of various strands of philological theory and practice, mainly between classicists (concerned with fixing defini-tive classical texts from existing versions) and theologians (concerned with fixing definitive or standardized scriptural texts, particularly the New Testament). Timpanaro also convincingly argued that Lachmann’s method came to be interrogated and superseded around the same time as comparative philological methods, but that doesn’t belie the fact that the associated arguments and conventions evidently continued to exer-cise a strong grip on text-based disciplines thereafter. So, in Timpanaro’s history most sorts of contemporary considerations in fixing texts (that particular text in abstract) are traceable in past scholarship, such as: obtaining an authorized or definitive version by appeal to tradition

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