Department Featured Event: Lecture. Stefani Engelstein (Duke University). Divisive Loves: Hierarchy and the Disciplines

Calls for a return to philology have resounded in the literary fields for a generation, but a closer look at the history of philology calls the desirability of this phantasm into question.  In the long nineteenth century, the field of philology disciplined human diversity by positioning its objects – languages, the people who speak them, and the textual cultures they produce – within living systems of adaptation and descent.  Over the course of the century, the disciplinary division between the humanities and the sciences cleaved philology into two uneasily matched halves: comparative linguistics and literary/cultural criticism, creating a disjuncture within the theorization of language also probed within literature itself.  Operating within a loosely shared methodological framework, the new fields constructed their objects as subject to opposed laws of development and appealed to increasingly disparate codes of legitimacy.  Even as they diverged, however, the branches reinforced each other in the production of hierarchies of culture imagined in forms as immutable and as toxic as those of the racial theories with which they were always already closely allied.  Particularly in light of the recent resurgence of Aryan and Nordic fantasies, our inherited humanist methodologies carry with them a responsibility for self-critical interrogation of our own disciplinary histories.