Error and the Academic Self : : The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern / / Seth Lerer.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Lerer, Seth,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2003]; ©2003
• Year of Publication: 2003
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (388 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- introduction. The Pursuit of Error: Philology, Rhetoric, and the History of Scholarship -- Chapter one. Errata: Mistakes and Masters in the Early Modern Book -- Chapter two. Sublime Philology: An Elegy for Anglo-Saxon Studies -- Chapter three. My Casaubon: The Novel of Scholarship and Victorian Philology -- Chapter four. Ardent Etymologies: American Rhetorical Philology, from Adams to de Man -- Chapter five. Making Mimesis: Exile, Errancy, and Erich Auerbach -- Epilogue. Forbidden Planet and the Terrors of Philology -- Notes -- Index