End Date :
The Heyman Center for the Humanities,
Komoda Room
ICLS Spring 2012 Graduate Colloquium presentation by Veli N. Yashin, (Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and ICLS)
This talk attends to the complex relationship between the philological project and the project of European identity in the work of Erich Auerbach, with a particular focus on his essay “Philologie der Weltliteratur.” Written in 1952, Auerbach’s essay testifies to the lasting encounter of philology with the so-called “crisis of historicism” (Troeltsch). This crisis, as Auerbach had painfully recognized, was (and still is), above all, a European crisis, a crisis of European identity; in the discovery of its historicity, Europe’s singular location as the authoritative vantage point in the world was in danger of being lost, and what was at stake was a radical decentering of Europe, its displacement as the ultimate point of reference. I extract the term “Europology” from Auerbach’s correspondence with his German publisher Vittorio Klostermann, where it refers to the project of Auerbach’s Introduction aux études de philologie romane (1949). Pointing to the circumstances of the book’s composition—“für Türken geschrieben”—Auerbach, in a characteristically apologetic fashion, dubs the book a “Europology.” Written in French as a manual for his students in Turkey, Introduction was indeed first published in Turkish translation (1944). That an introduction to “La philologie et ses différentes formes” (the title of the book’s first section) may serve as an introduction to “Europe” for Turkish students, that philology, in this way, may paradigmatically function as the “European science”—the science of Europe—that the word philology, in this pedagogical situation, may dictate, ever-so-silently, the word Europe is a powerful testament to the unmistakable and abiding, if at times embarrassing, association of philology with Europe, of its exacting methodological dispositions with the untiring articulation, affirmation, and preservation of European identity. And who could have known this better and expressed it more economically than Erich Auerbach, that consummate Occidentalist?
The ICLS graduate colloquium is an opportunity for our graduate students to present excerpts from their dissertations-in-progress to the ICLS community and receive feedback. Faculty and students are invited.
Coffee and cookies will be served.
