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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Romantic Etymology and Language Ecology Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p62w19f Author Wolff, Tristram Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Romantic Etymology and Language Ecology by Tristram Nash Wolff A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Anne-Lise François, Chair Professor Michael Lucey Professor Steven Goldsmith Professor Judith Butler Professor Niklaus Largier Fall 2013 Romantic Etymology and Language Ecology © 2013 by Tristram Nash Wolff Abstract Romantic Etymology and Language Ecology by Tristram Nash Wolff Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory University of California, Berkeley Professor Anne-Lise François, Chair This dissertation brings to light an etymological poetics in European and American Romanticism, through natural figures of temporal process that changed language’s shape. I argue that the supposed “primitivism” of theories that root language in nature can often be better understood as efforts to model a simultaneous solidity and liquidity in language’s forms, using metaphors borrowed from natural history. These theories react against arbitrary or conventional Lockean “signs” and the rational agents who invent them, while at the same time avoiding the stability of traditional “naturalisms,” such as Cratylic or Adamic myths of naming. By demonstrating the ethical insufficiency of words alienated from their disorderly contexts, the practice of “Romantic etymology” reconstructs not derivations of individual words, but linguistic philosophy itself. Chapter One begins by crediting Herder and Humboldt with the effort to transfer language’s “origin” from the distant past to an ongoing process of formation, so that language is ecologically formed through complex, collective processes of which individuals always remain partly in the dark. Chapter Two develops the idea of a language ecology by placing Blake’s poetry in the context of eighteenth-century debates about the limits imposed on linguistic life by the silent, motionless figure of stone. Against such limits, I read Blake’s poetic voices in “The Clod and the Pebble” as a language of geological process. Chapter Three examines Wordsworth’s relation to the etymological logic produced by Coleridge’s interest in radical philologist John Horne Tooke. In a reading of “Hart-Leap Well,” I argue that Wordsworth resists simplistic origin stories by illustrating language’s vulnerability to disintegration and reformation. Chapter Four follows this linguistic naturalism to America, finding that in their most apparently “Cratylic” or naïve moments, the Romantic essays of Emerson and Thoreau aim not to name the primitive roots anchoring individual words, but to recognize language’s inevitable mobility. A retrospective Coda traces nineteenth-century philology’s development from a positivist cultural formation with vague ties to natural history and organicist metaphysics, to a social science determined to cut ties with its naturalist past by reviving the terminology of linguistic “arbitrariness”; this disciplinary history illuminates a concluding etymological episode in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, whose critical naturalism detaches language from a particularly immobile idea of nature. 1 Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction: Uprooting “Nature”: Etymology and Ecology 1 I. “Refuge in Etymology” II. Frail Bonds Chapter One: Against Willkürlichkeit: Formative Ecologies in Herder and Humboldt 17 I. Introduction: Nature’s Context II. Herder’s Abhandlung: Disobedient Form a) Willkür as Opposed to What? b) Ecological “Invention” and Analogie c) Inexpressible Origins III. Humboldt’s Herder: Language as “Fashioned Organism” IV. For a Romantic Etymology Chapter Two: “Voices of the Ground”: Blake’s Language in Deep Time 47 I. Introduction: Slowing Desire II. No Vestige, No Prospect: “Mute Teachers” and Legible Rocks III. Matter’s Heart: Vocal Forms in The Book of Thel IV. “Metres Meet”: Linguistic Geology in “The Clod and Pebble” Chapter Three: Diversions of Etymology: Tooke, Coleridge, and Wordsworth 73 I. Introduction: Felt Transitions II. Dissolving the Problem: The Radical Reformer III. Breaking Up: The Neologizing Critic IV. Breaking Down: The Poet of Tendency Chapter Four: Etymologies of the Woods: Emerson and Thoreau 106 I. Introduction: The Natural History of Tropes II. “Held Lightly”: Emerson’s Terms of Renewal III. Walden’s Wilds a) Etymological Excursion: “The Ponds” b) Etymological Excursion: “The Bean-Field” c) Etymological Excursion: “Spring” IV. First and Last Words Coda: Nature and Philology: Proust and the Error of Etymology 133 I. Introduction: “Geology of the Grammatical World” II. A Botanico-Philological Problem III. Proust’s Corrective IV. “An Original Mistake in Our Premises” Bibliography 154 i Acknowledgments To the lessons in language from my undergraduate mentors: Susan Bernstein, on the weird and the rhetorical; Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, on the elegant and the accidental; Geoffrey Russom, on the formal and the “Anglo-Saxon.” To Anne-Lise François, whose critical passions always seem to bring my own more closely within reach; Michael Lucey, whose intellectual practice has changed my mind; Steven Goldsmith, whose generosity shaped the project at each stage, and whose ear and eye for Blake helped draw me to Berkeley; Judith Butler, for support and criticism — and for uprooting nature, in a language both firm and fluent; and Niklaus Largier, who, alongside Giambattisto Vico, helped clear a path toward the rhetoric of etymology. “How different their eye and ear! How different the world to them!” But how lucky to know all. For critical interventions and collaborative conversations: Kevis Goodman, Janet Sorenson, Rob Kaufman. Celeste Langan deserves special mention: she not only placed John Horne Tooke’s etymologies in my way back in 2008, but then followed Tooke two years later with the creature who became Klaus the cat. For support financial and intellectual, the 2011 Summer Mellon Dissertation Seminar and its fellows; the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis; the 2012-13 Townsend Center for the Humanities and its fellows; the UC Berkeley Department of Comparative Literature; and the editors of Essays in Romanticism, journal of the International Conference on Romanticism. To those who read parts of my dissertation, and left their prints on it: among them are indispensable allies and dissertation reading group members Toby Warner, Katrina Dodson, Corey Byrnes, and sometimes Emily Drumsta; Kathryn Crim (Marx and rocks), Tom McEnaney (Proust and trains), and Alex Dubilet (“more Soviet mineralogy please!”). No amount of follow-through could do justice to the possible worlds envisioned in conversation with Andrea Gadberry: to our many projects, real and imagined. For other necessary friendships and revelatory conversations about this, that and the other, as I worked: David Simon, Rhiannon Graybill, Michael Lukas, Justin Boner, Travis Wilds, Shaul Setter (of course!), Lealah Pollock. Amanda Jo Goldstein and Lily Gurton-Wachter are, in addition to being old comrades, two luminous model Romanticists. To my parents, Christian Wolff and Holly Nash Wolff, and my siblings Tico, Tamsen and Yeo — a close-knit clan, in many stripes — boundless thanks for love, conversation, work and play. Klaus, who falling asleep in my lap used mild force to persuade me to write. And lastly to Corey, who by taking my work seriously and keeping me from taking work too seriously, made it work — then helped set it aside. When I try to say how I feel, the words move. ii Introduction Uprooting “Nature”: Etymology and Ecology For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they sit atop smoothly and a little force should be enough to push them aside. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly joined to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.1 — Kafka, “The Trees” Frail is the bond, by which we hold Our being, be we young or old, Wise, foolish, weak or strong. — Wordsworth, “The Oak and the Broom” I. “Refuge in Etymology” One story told in Kafka’s parable “Die Bäume” walks the reader through a sequence of illusions about rootedness. A “we” (quickly changed to a “they”) looks temporarily perched; then seems more permanently fixed; then seems, in a second reversal, capable of being detached from the ground after all. The appearance of simply resting is complicated by the discovery of firm attachments, but these attachments can, it turns out, be remedied. There is the vague sense of a humble life that proves itself to be made of sterner stuff, only to be ominously ‘eradicated’ in the end after all. Kafka’s analogy (“wir sind wie Baumstämme”), if read beside Wordsworth’s “The Oak and the Broom: A Pastoral,” might conceivably be imagined as a late twist on the “trick” of pastoral (in Empson’s broad sense of grafting the lofty onto the humble, or “putting the complex into the simple”). Wordsworth’s lyric centers on a conversation between a patriarchal oak tree standing high on a crag and a quick-witted shrub growing out of the rocks below about the relative stability of their positions: with apt irony, the storm that then uproots the prominent oak spares the broom. The humble broom gets the lofty speech (“Frail is the bond, by which we hold / our being,” etc.); the oak meets a sudden end; and the lowlier and simpler is revealed as the surer root. And yet: something about that line — “frail is the bond” — stays with us; something in Wordsworth’s tone tells us he believes that this small triumph, too, is “only appearance.” Such a phrase, asserting both bond and impermanence, implies that something like Kafka’s second reversal, the last twist of “Die Bäume,” is already turning in Wordsworth’s pastoral poetry: all feelings of rootedness are matched by the persistent awareness of their frailty.
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