Stephen G. Nichols PHILOLOGY AS BLOOD SPORT: the ROMANIC

Stephen G. Nichols PHILOLOGY AS BLOOD SPORT: THE ROMANIC REVIEW’S FIRST DECADE t is not exactly fashionable today to call our feld Romance philology. IDescribing a colleague as a “philologist” in fact might well elicit a less than cheerful response. It’s even become vieux jeu to call ourselves literary critics. So how are we to refer to our métier in an era when so many departments have abandoned the term “French literature” to describe themselves in favor of portmanteau rubrics like “Department of French, Francophone, Post-colonial Studies”? One look at the tortured efforts to defne a position in the MLA job listings makes clear how fragmented our domain has become. We now talk in terms of subspecialties—Feminist studies, Francophone, queer theory, post- structural theory (does anyone still do pre-structuralist theory?). And still, most of us do have a dim sense that our feld once was known as “Romance philology.” And we would agree, I believe, that as a discipline, ours is an exacting one. But how, exactly, would we defne it today? Most likely, we would parse it either as the work of the individual scholar responding to a particular vision of humanist activity, or as a phenomenon of institutional authority. Both views produce a history of practice, much as René Wellek once sought to write a history of modern criticism by cumulative analyses of the work of individual critics on one hand and schools of criticism on the other. I wonder, though, if it would occur to us to ask how a discipline like Romance philology emerges in a given time and place as an ongoing series of represen- tational events in a carefully defned framework? What is counter-intuitive here is the idea that a discipline is less a function of people per se than of a continuous stream of written communications. In other words, it evolves from the systematic publication of scholarly articles in a journal founded for and dedicated to that purpose. But before pursuing this third way of defning Romance philology, let’s look briefy at the frst two modes mentioned. Erich Auerbach offers an excellent illustration of the frst when he sets out to describe Romance philology in his Introduction aux études de la philologie romane as “the set of activities that concern themselves systematically with human language, and in particular with works of art composed in that medium.” In this account, philology serves textual transmission “in order,” as Auerbach says, “to preserve from the ravages of time the works that constitute its intellectual patrimony; to preserve them not The Romanic Review Volume 101 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 75 8/31/11 3:43 PM 76 Stephen G. Nichols only from oblivion but also from the changes, mutilations, and additions that necessarily result from popular consumption or the negligence of copyists.”1 On the side of the second defnition, which views a discipline as a phenomenon of institutional authority, the Middle English scholar Seth Lerer offers a double perspective when he writes of its European origins: Most narrowly, ‘philology’ connotes the study of historical linguistics as it developed in the nineteenth century and came to be associated, especially in German universities, with the practices of lexicography, textual criticism, and literary-aesthetic evaluation. This practice centered on two mutually-related inquiries: the esta- blishment of historical phonology and the codifcation of sound changes as the ‘laws’ of diachronic linguistics; and the excavation of the etymologies of individual words, often in the process leading to the recovery of defning social or cultural norms. Of the emergence of philology in America, Lerer then writes: Both aspects of the philological tradition were central to the work of William Dwight Whitney (1827–94), professor of compara- tive philology and Sanskrit at Yale University from 1853 until his death. Whitney often used the study of a given word’s etymology to understand the institutions of Indo-European culture. [. .] His philology not only synthesizes its academic heritage but pointedly looks forward to a range of critical phenomena we have now come to associate with the Saussurian revolution in language study and, as its consequences, with the structuralist and poststructuralist conceptions of the fundamentally linguistic nature of social orga- nization and expression. Such conceptions were, as one critic has put it, ‘clairvoyantly glimpsed’ by Whitney. (17) While both these accounts have in common the conviction that philology focuses on language as a means of artistic representation on one hand, and of communication on the other, they convey rather different views of philological context. For Erich Auerbach, the philologist, like the original author, works 1. The preceding two quotations are from Erich Auerbach, Introduction aux études de la philologie romane (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1949) 9. English translation from Suzanne Fleischman, “Medieval Vernaculars and the Myth of Monoglossia: A Con- spiracy of Linguistics and Philology,” Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 92–93. Cited by Seth Lerer, “Philology & Criticism at Yale,” The Journal of Aesthetic Educa- tion 36.3 (Autumn 2002): 19. Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 76 8/31/11 3:43 PM THE ROMANIC REVIEW’s First Decade 77 alone. Lerer, however, sees the institution as a matrix where what he calls “professional practices” emerge and evolve. Here is Lerer’s view: What role does the philological tradition have in the developing profession of American literary study and, in turn, how do the various exemplars of that tradition function as models of professional practice? I [would] argue [. .] that the story of philology and criticism is distinctively a Yale account [in which] fgures such as William Dwight Whitney and Erich Auerbach form the poles of an inquiry into the development of literary study (and, not the least, literary theory) at Yale, and, furthermore, that such recent developments as the New Historicism have a Yale philological and institutional origin that its practitioners have only recently admit- ted [. .]. (16) Lerer’s enthusiasm for the institutional model allows him to designate philology at Yale as the fons et origo of literary theory: “I would contend,” he says, “that Whitney’s work contains within it the seeds of a structuralist or even poststructuralist project—that ‘literary theory,’ as we understand it, begins in nineteenth-century Yale philology.” (18) We need not linger over this assertion of Yale’s hegemony over American philology, theory, and critical studies. Instead, let’s look back one hundred years to the founding of the Romanic Review at Columbia University. The story is worth telling. It involves a new vision of how philology could be consti- tuted as a scientifc—in the sense of French science or German W issenschaft— discipline in America. The vision belonged to Henry Alfred Todd, who, in 1909, was considered America’s foremost Romance philologist.2 Todd had a truly pioneering career in Romance philology. In the early 1880s, he spent three years in Europe, studying in Berlin, Rome, Madrid and Paris, where he completed a doctorate with Gaston Paris at the Sorbonne. Gas- ton Paris later wrote that Todd was the frst American to edit an Old French 2. In his Life of Henry Alfred Todd—the introduction to the frst of two Todd Memo- rial volumes—John Fitz-Gerald reported the following anecdote: “In 1900 the present writer was a student in Berlin under Adolf Tobler, and enjoyed the privilege of many private interviews in the home of the great scholar. On one such occasion Tobler re- marked: “Todd is wohl der bedeuntendste der Romanisten in ganz Amerika” (“Todd is the most important Romance scholar in the entire United States”). The phrase re- mained deeply imprinted on the memory of the young man who had had the privilege of being trained under Todd for several years.” Todd Memorial Volumes: Philological Studies, eds. John D. Fitz-Gerald and Pauline Taylor, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia UP, 1930) 12. Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 77 8/31/11 3:43 PM 78 Stephen G. Nichols work, and one of the frst to be commissioned by the prestigious Société des Anciens Textes Français to do an edition.3 In 1883, Todd returned to the United States to study in the newly founded Ph.D. program of Romance philology at Johns Hopkins University under the guidance of A. Marshall Elliott. Obtaining the doctorate in 1885—his second—he joined Elliott on the faculty at Hopkins where he taught Vulgar Latin, Old French, Old Provençal, Old Italian (Dante), and Early Spanish. He also seconded Elliott in founding Modern Language Notes, the frst journal devoted to publishing scholarly research in modern languages.4 Todd would teach at Johns Hopkins until 1891, when he was called to chair the Depart- ment of Romance Languages at Stanford University, which he did for two years before being summoned to Columbia in 1893. The years at Hopkins stamped Todd with fervor for introducing principles of scientifc research into the new discipline of Romance philology. In this aspiration, he was at one with his institution. As the frst modern graduate school in the 1880s, Hopkins trained historians and philologists who went on to revolutionize their disciplines and graduate education itself at prestigious universities throughout North America. Two decades later, in 1910, Todd reminisced about this formative period in the second issue of his new journal, the Romanic Review. Since 1881, The Johns Hopkins University has conferd [sic] the degree of doctor of philosophy on forty-nine students in the department of Romance languages . twenty-one of whom are now heads of departments or full professors in universities or colleges, including the Universities of Chicago, Columbia, Har- vard, Pittsburgh, Stanford, Yale, Alabama, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, Washington, and Amherst, Bryn Mawr, Gallaudet, Gaucher, Ober- lin, and Randoph-Macon Colleges.5 3.

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