Metaphilology

Jan M. Ziolkowski, Harvard University

The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship. By Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 93 $24.95.

Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern. By Seth Lerer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 325. $52.50 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).


THE RETURN TO PHILOLOGY AND THE NOT-SO-NEW NEW PHILOLOGY

Philology can be strangely polarizing. Indeed, both of the books under review manifest a simultaneous attraction and revulsion for philology and its practitioners. Nor are Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Seth Lerer by any means alone or unprecedented in their ambivalence toward philology. For a term that carries the Greek root for "love" as its first element, the word has proved to be recurrently incendiary for centuries and even millennia, periodically occasioning discomfort and even internecine strife between literary scholars and linguists, literary historians and literary theorists, and traditionalists or conservatives and innovators. Within the humanities in colleges and universities, the love of logos would seem to lie at the heart of a complex love-hate relationship.