Feeling and Classical Philology: Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, 1770–1920 (Classics after Antiquity)
Cambridge University Press, 3/5/2020
EAN 9781107104235, ISBN10: 1107104238
Hardcover, 238 pages, 22.9 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Nineteenth-century German classical philology underpins many structures of the modern humanities. In this book, Constanze Güthenke shows how a language of love and a longing for closeness with a personified antiquity have lastingly shaped modern professional reading habits, notions of biography, and the self-image of scholars and teachers. She argues that a discourse of love was instrumental in expressing the challenges of specialisation and individual formation (Bildung), and in particular for the key importance of a Platonic scene of learning and instruction for imagining the modern scholar. The book is based on detailed readings of programmatic texts from, among others, Wolf, Schleiermacher, Boeckh, Thiersch, Dilthey, Wilamowitz and Nietzsche. It makes a case for revising established narratives, but also for finding new value in imagining distance and an absence of nostalgic longing for antiquity.
Introduction
feeling and philology
1. The potter's daughter
longing, Bildung, and the self
2. From the symposium to the seminar
language of love and language of institutions
3. 'So that he unknowingly and delicately mirrors himself in front of us, as the beautiful often do'
Schleiermacher's Plato
4. 'Enthusiasm dwells only in one-sidedness'
knowledge of antiquity and professional philology
5. 'The most instructive form in which we encounter an understanding of life'
the age of biography
6. The life of the Centaur
Wilamowitz, biography, Nietzsche
Epilogue
on keeping a distance.