1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910456049203321

Autore

Lerer Seth <1955->

Titolo

Error and the academic self [[electronic resource] ] : the scholarly imagination, medieval to modern / / Seth Lerer

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : Columbia University Press, 2002

ISBN

0-231-50747-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (253 p.)

Disciplina

820.9

Soggetti

English philology - History

Scholarly publishing - Great Britain

Errors and blunders, Literary - History

English literature - History and criticism - Theory, etc

American literature - History and criticism - Theory, etc

Error - History

Electronic books.

Great Britain Intellectual life

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- 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

Sommario/riassunto

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.