THE MODERN AMERICAN UNIVERSITY AND EARLY ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS: GERMAN MODELS AND AMERICAN PRACTICE, 1870-1920

Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, Cilt:13, Sayı:1, Mart 2015 Beşeri Bilimler Sayısı CBÜ SOSYAL BİLİMLER DERGİSİ Yıl : 2015 Cilt :13 Sayı :1 THE MODERN AMERICAN UNIVERSITY AND EARLY ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS: GERMAN MODELS AND AMERICAN PRACTICE, 1870-19201 Yrd. Doç. Dr. Gerard PAULSEN Celal Bayar Üniversitesi, Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi, İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü ABSTRACT The English department first came into existence in the modern American university; its theoretical apparatus, research methodology and pedagogic practices were directly derived from nineteenth-century German philology. Whereas the postCivil War educational reformers who constructed the modern American academic system adapted the German university model to fit it to the social and cultural patterns of America, professors in early English departments simply borrowed German philology and method and, without substantially adding to it or altering it, used it over the next five or six decades as the basis intense research publication. This paper aims to show why American professors of English were so enamored of German philology and, more importantly, what kind of research it enabled them to produce. In addition, it will attempt to examine the consequences of the philological orientation of early English departments and to explain why, when the New Critics finally supplanted philologists and their literary historian descendants, philology almost completely disappeared from English departments. Keywords: American higher education, the modern American university, philology, German philology, American philology, nineteenth-century linguistics, transnationalism, English departments, English literature, English major. MODERN AMERİKAN ÜNİVERSİTESİ VE İLK İNGİLİZCE BÖLÜMLERİ: ALMAN MODELLERİ VE AMERİKAN UYGULAMASI, 1870-1920 ÖZ İngiliz Dili bölümü ilk olarak modern Amerikan üniversitesinde var olmuştur. Teorik aygıtını, araştırma metodolojisini ve pedagojik uygulamalarını ise doğrudan 19. Yüzyıl Alman filolojisinden almıştır. Modern Amerikan akademik sistemini kuran İç 1 Makalenin geliş tarihi: 01.02.2015 Makalenin kabul tarihi: 13.03.2015 24 Celal Bayar Üniversitesi Savaş sonrası eğitim reformcuları Alman üniversite modelini Amerika’nın sosyal ve kültürel yapısına uydurmaya çalışırken erken İngiliz Dili bölümlerindeki akademisyenler ise ciddi bir ekleme veya değişiklik yapmadan doğrudan Alman filolojisini ve metodunu ödünç almışlar ve takip eden elli veya altmış yıl boyunca araştırma ve yayınlarının temeli olarak kullanmışlardır. Bu çalışma, Amerikalı akademisyenlerin Alman filolojisine hayranlıklarının sebeplerini ve daha da önemlisi bu filolojinin ne tür araştırmalar üretmelerini sağladığını göstermeyi amaçlamaktadır. Ayrıca, ilk İngiliz Dili bölümlerinin filoloji yöneliminin sonuçlarını ve Yeni Eleştiricilerin; filologların ve edebiyat tarihçilerinin yerini aldığı zaman filolojinin İngiliz Dili bölümlerinden nerdeyse tamamen kaybolmasının sebeplerini incelemeye çalışacaktır. Anahtar Kelimeler: Amerikan yükseköğretimi, modern Amerikan üniversitesi, filoloji, Alman filolojisi, Amerikan filolojisi, 19. yüzyıl dilbilimi, ulusötesicilik, İngiliz Dili bölümleri, İngiliz Edebiyatı, İngiliz Dili anadalı. Introduction The history of the English department is intimately connected with the emergence of the modern American university in the post-Civil War period, for it was in the transformed traditional colleges and newly established universities that English departments were first established. Yet, whereas the educational reformers who created the modern American academic system adapted the German university model to fit it to the patterns of American society and governance, professors in early English departments made few changes to the theory and methods they borrowed from German philology. The academic system established by the American educational reformers of the 1860s and 1870s proved capable of evolving in concert with the changing needs of American society, industry and business; this system has remained, in all but a few details, largely intact right up to the present. In contrast, the philological theory and methods that dominated English departments from their inception in the 1870s through to the 1920s (and, in a less rigorously theoretical form known as literary history, until the late 1940s) subsequently disappeared almost without trace from English departments. New Criticism, which replaced philology in the early 1950s as the dominant departmental theory and method, did not evolve out of philology; rather it represented a sharp rejection both of philology’s theory and its method. Few early English-department publications are still read today; philology, as it was practiced and taught in American universities for some fifty years, has been so completely erased from departmental memory that precisely what American philologists did and why they did it seems to have been largely forgotten. In recent decades, there have been occasional calls for a return to philology, most notably Paul de Man’s “The Return to Philology” (in his The Resistance to Theory, 1986), Edward Said’s “The Return to Philology” (in his posthumous volume Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 2004) and Michael Holquist’s “Why We Should Remember Philology” (2002). These calls for a 25 Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, Cilt:13, Sayı:1, Mart 2015 Beşeri Bilimler Sayısı return, as Geoffrey Harpham has recently noted, typically invoke a favored version of philology, ignore most of the actual history of philological study, and sidestep the dangers involved in any such return. Harpham, however, focusses primarily on the more speculative aspects of philological theorizing and ignores the extent to which linguistic philologists, at least, had by the mid nineteenth century largely given up on such theorizing. More surprisingly, he asserts, contrary to the evidence readily available in first five or six decades of PMLA, MLN and Modern Philology, that “philology had been unable to establish itself as an academic discipline in the American research universities taking shape at the end of the nineteenth century” (Harpham, 2009: 50). This paper aims to demonstrate that both the modern American university and its newly invented modern-language departments were derived in large part from German models. It aims as well to show precisely what professors in the early English departments borrowed from German philological theory and how they used its methodological apparatus to generate decades of specialized departmental research. 1. The Modern American University and the German Academic Model The modern American university emerged shortly after the Civil War and was in many of its essentials based directly on the contemporary German university model. The traditional American college had, from the founding of Harvard in 1636 until the late 1860s, remained largely unchanged both in its organization and in its orientations: its curriculum was almost entirely prescribed a (...truncated)