Feeling and Classical Philology
Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, 1770–1920

Argues that German classical philology personified antiquity and imagined scholarship as an inter-personal relationship with it.

Constanze Güthenke (Author)

9781107104235, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 March 2020

238 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.47 kg

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.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900 [HPCD], Literature & literary studies [D], Philosophy of language [CFA]