In studying literature I have always wanted (since my undergraduate days in the early 1980s) to associate myself with a group of German romanists including Curtius, Spitzer, Auerbach, and to a certain extent Benjamin. Now, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, one of the most interesting comparatists working today, writes as follows:
Ernst Robert Curtius laid the foundations of his academic reputation in the 1920s, when he was known as an eminent specialist in contemporary French and Spanish literature; he then, from the early 1930s on, began to concentrate on the history of poetological ideas and literary forms in the Middle Ages. Leo Spitzer had been trained, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, as a historical linguist, but he soon turned toward a highly subjective style of immanent-text interpretation (for which the concept of "lived experience" was key). Erich Auerbach, finally, who singlehandedly created a new discourse within literary history, was notoriously weak when it came to the basic phililogical skills.
(The Powers of Philology, 1)
Soit. None of them, then, was a philologist in the proper sense. I can't claim anything either, with my UTTER LACK of basics. It's a pity indeed but it's beginning to be too late to catch up. I've known it always. What a mess. Typical me.
But then when someone like Paul de Man talks about philology, he seems to me to have a solid intention in mind. Departing from metaphisics of "philo-sophy," I think he tried to concentrate on language's rhetorical aspects. Hence, "philo-logy," a materialist gaze at the texture of language per se.
And this brings me back to Burke's logology.
