Seth
Lerer.
Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination,
Medieval
to Modern.
New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003.
388pp.
Publisher's
recommended price
Hardback
ISBN 0231123728, $62.00
Paperback ISBN 0231123736, $22.50
How and
why did the
academic style of writing, with its emphasis on criticism and
correctness,
develop? Seth Lerer suggests that the answer lies in medieval and
Renaissance
philology and, more specifically, in mistakes. For Lerer, erring is not
simply being wrong, but being errant, and this book illuminates the
wanderings
of exiles, émigrés, dissenters, and the socially
estranged
as they helped form the modern university disciplines of philology and
rhetoric, literary criticism, and literary theory. Examining a diverse
group that includes Thomas More, Stephen Greenblatt, George Hickes,
Seamus
Heaney, George Eliot, and Paul de Man, Error and the Academic Self
argues that this critical abstraction from society and retreat into
ivory
towers allowed estranged individuals to gain both a sense of private
worth
and the public legitimacy of a professional identity.
Contents:
Introduction:
The Pursuit of Error: Philology, Rhetoric, and the History of
Scholarship
1.
Errata: Mistakes
and Masters in the Early Modern Book
2.
Sublime Philology:
An Elegy for Anglo-Saxon Studies
3.
My
Casaubon:
The Novel of Scholarship and Victorian Philology
4.
Ardent
Etymologies:
American Rhetorical Philology, from Adams to de
Man
5.
Making
Mimesis:
Exile, Errancy, and Erich Auerbach
Epilogue:
Forbidden
Planet and the Terrors of Philology.
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