Philology is the foundational interpretive art behind comparative literature’s worldview

Evidence

As a humanist whose field is literature, I am old enough to have been trained forty years ago in the field of comparative literature, whose leading ideas go back to Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before that I must mention the supremely creative contribution of Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher and philologist whose ideas anticipate and later infiltrate the line of German thinkers I am about to cite. They belong to the era of Herder and Wolf, later to be followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and finally the great twentieth-century Romance philologists Erich Auerback, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius. To young people of the current generation the very idea of philology suggests something impossibly antiquarian and musty, but philology in fact is the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts. It is exemplified for me most admirably in Goethe’s interest in Islam generally, and Hafiz in particular, a consuming passion that led to the composition of the West-Östlicher Diwan, and it inflected Goethe’s later ideas about Weltliteratur, the study of all the literatures of the world as a symphonic whole that could be apprehended theoretically as having preserved the individuality of each work without losing sight of the whole. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 40

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines philology as ‘the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts’ and locates its German intellectual genealogy (Vico through Herder, Goethe, Dilthey, Nietzsche to Auerbach, Spitzer, Curtius) — a key lineage for the Western intellectual tradition Said is critiquing from within.
• XREF: Goethe’s Weltliteratur and philology lineage will be the very tradition whose limits Orientalism exposes; useful scaffold for later readings on representation and the construction of the Other.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 40