The Transatlantic Renewal of Textual Practices: Philology, Religion, and Classicism in Madame de Staël, Herder, and Emerson Ulrike Wagner Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Ulrike Wagner All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Transatlantic Renewal of Textual Practices: Philology, Religion, and Classicism in Madame de Staël, Herder, and Emerson Ulrike Wagner This dissertation demonstrates how the rise of historical criticism in Germany transformed practices of reading, writing, and public address in the related fields of classicism and biblical criticism in a transnational context. In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, writers on both sides of the Atlantic rendered these practices foundational to the goals of self-formation, cultural and spiritual renewal, and educational reform. In this process, Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1814) played a key role in disseminating new historically informed modes of teaching, preaching, translating, and reconstructing secular and religious texts among Transcendentalists. I show that her cultural study epitomizes crucial characteristics and functions of the historically informed textual practices that Johann Gottfried Herder’s works articulated paradigmatically in Germany and which we find refracted in reviews, addresses, essays, and translations by many Antebellum American scholars, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson. By bringing together intellectuals from both sides of the Atlantic in the context of their responses and contributions to century-old classical and religious debates, this study presents a different perspective on terms such as individual autonomy or spiritual freedom that have come to be seen by the critical literature as paradigmatic for our understanding of the nineteenth-century relationship between German and American culture and its mediation by Staël. Unlike in the discourse of idealism that dominates the existing body of scholarship on the transnational impact of German Romanticism, Staël, Emerson, and his cohort do not associate these terms with abstract philosophical concepts but with specific exercises and practices the subject can deploy in different ways. The first chapter focuses on Staël’s discussion of how the learning of foreign languages and one’s historical engagement with them fosters the individual’s independent judgment and thinking. I concentrate on her investigation of how Winckelmann and Herder engage with ancient cultures by feeling themselves into the strange worlds of the past and by turning these acts of imaginary displacement into an occasion for creative reconstitutions of Greek art and Hebrew Scripture so that they serve Germany’s spiritual and cultural revival. The second chapter explores how Herder renders practices of empathetic immersion and historical investigations foundational to his philological activities and translations. I work out his treatment of sacred and secular texts as sites for the anthropological making of meaning and of what he calls the human imperative of “Selbstschöpfung” or “self-shaping.” The third chapter examines how the relationship between historicism, philology, and the rise of new models of education, cultural reform, and religious experience that figure so prominently in both Staël’s and Herder’s works resonate in a myriad of Transcendentalist texts. I look at how American classicists and critics like James Marsh and George Ripley discuss and adopt German techniques of self-abandonment, empathy, and poetic philology to refashion practices of preaching and teaching. The fourth chapter investigates how Emerson takes these contemporary debates about the value of scholarship and historical inquiry for educational reforms and the reinvigoration of religion a step further by developing the practices others highlight in the works of Herder or Friedrich Schleiermacher into fully- fledged cultural techniques. Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Chapter I: From Words to Worlds: De l’Allemagne and the Recasting of the Ancient 15 Past Reverberations of a Great Divide: From De la Littérature to De l’Allemagne in 24 Light of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes and the Vorzugsstreit Rethinking the Past through the Lens of Language Education, and Winckelmann 34 Staël’s Herder, Religious Revival, and France’s Cultural Recovery 48 Chapter II: Der Mensch siehet nur, wie ein Mensch siehet: Modern Functions of 64 Ancient Greek and Hebrew Literature in Light of Herder’s Anthropological Thinking Herder’s Winckelmann, Classical Scholarship, and the Use of History 73 Personified Beginnings: Arguing Animals, Grumpy Trees, and the Birth of Poetry 86 Origin as Contest and Creation in Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie 104 Chapter III: Transcendentalism’s Critical Instruments: German Historical Scholarship 124 and the Transformation of Religion and Classicism in New England Herder, Schleiermacher and the Power of Philology 135 Religious Sociability and the Reinvention of the Ministry 167 i Classicism, Self-Culture, and the Rise of the Art of Liberal Education 187 Chapter IV: Emerson in his Time 207 Man can paint, or make, or think, nothing but man: On History and the Use of 215 Books Ejaculations of a few imaginative men: Emerson on Religion 233 Loving, Forming, Abandoning: Duties of American Scholars and Emerson as a 245 Lecturer Conclusion 262 Works Cited 269 ii Acknowledgements In keeping with its topic, the writing of this dissertation has spanned several years of travelling between Germany and America, and its completion would be unthinkable without the generous institutional and individual support I received on both sides of the Atlantic. In New York, I thank my advisor Dorothea von Mücke for guiding along the formation and refining of this project through her careful reading and the detailed feedback she always provided at each stage of the writing process. I am grateful to Ross Posnock for his abiding trust and support at points when even I doubted the feasibility of the approach I had chosen for exploring new facets of the relationship between German Romanticism and American Transcendentalism. I thank Lydia Goehr for showing me what making a commitment to scholarship and teaching as a way of life means, and for being an inspiring and untiring fellow traveler between Germany and America. I am very grateful to William Dellinger for his constant support in all practical matters of making my graduate student life work, and to Mary Helen Dupree for giving me advice on how to navigate through each stage of the graduate program. Richard Korb has taught me to teach and make teaching matter in ways I had not known. And the hassles of writing a dissertation would never have been filled with so many delightful moments and helpful conversations without my friends and fellow writers Jennifer Cameron, Dehlia Hannah, Dalia Inbal, and Julia Nordmann. iii In Cambridge I would like to thank the professors and students in the department of Germanic languages at Harvard for hosting me as a visiting researcher over several semesters, and for discussing individual chapters with me in their colloquium. The writing of chapters 3 and 4 would not have been possible without the research I was able to conduct in Harvard’s libraries and archives. A graduate fellowship at Trinity College in Hartford introduced me to the liberal arts model of education, and helped me complete portions of the dissertation. A GSAS Columbia University fellowship, a doctoral research fellowship at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and a Elsa-Neumann dissertation fellowship did not only make it possible for me to spend uninterrupted portions of time on my work but also enabled me to engage in many invaluable conversations with Berlin-based scholars over my research. Especially the chapters on Herder and Staël gained from my membership of the SFB “Transformationen der Antike” and the PhD-Net “Das Wissen der Literatur” at Humboldt Universität. I thank Joseph Vogl and above all Andrea Polaschegg whose support of my project went far beyond what I could ever have hoped for. Her comments on those parts of the dissertation concerned with Herder’s religious thinking were immensely helpful. My thanks also to Ernst Osterkamp and his doctoral students for discussing Staël’s relationship to Goethe, Kant, and Winckelmann with me. At the Freie Universität, I am deeply indebted to my former mentor Winfried Fluck who was the first to spark my interest in this dissertation’s topic and provided continuous advice over the years of its unfolding. Johannes Voelz has read all chapters and commented on nearly every thought that has gone into writing them. iv Finally, I want to thank my family, and in particular my mother Juliane Koberg- Wagner, for bearing with me and supporting me even though they often could not help but wonder how I could possibly invest such enormous amounts of time into a single piece of writing. And I know that this dissertation would not exist if it weren’t for the unfailing commitment to me and my work by Swen Voekel and Christiane Caemmerer. Christiane has supported my scholarly interests in every way possible since the day I can remember, and Swen’s love, loyalty, and intellectual integrity have been an invaluable gift. I dedicate this project to both of them with love. v 1 Introduction The Transatlantic Renewal of Textual Practices: Philology, Religion, and Classicism in Madame de Staël, Herder, and Emerson demonstrates