ABSTRACT

Theory dismisses philology with a wave of the hand for naively believing in truth, being hung up on interpretation, having the bad taste to think that meticulous reading produces specific meaning, believing authors’ intentions matter. Philology, it turns out – in its modern eighteenth-century origins, its nineteenth-century putrescence, and its current resurgence – is everything comparative literature has always struggled over, failed to recognize in itself, or busily tried to abandon. In the early 2000s, philology is taken up again in high-profile journal articles and experimental “avant”-books as though its historical backwash were lapping against postmodern shores. Philology in the end is what theory cannot live up to: not symptomatic reading, not “reading against the grain,” not reader-response or any other alibi for making things up or appropriating authors for political purposes to make them mean the opposite of what they say – “creatively.”.