Stephen G. Nichols

Erich Auerbach: History, Literature and Jewish Philosophy

I cannot honestly say that reading Mimesis when it first appeared in English convinced me to become a medievalist. That was already my goal. It was, however, one of the reasons I applied to do my doctoral studies at Yale. Even though I knew of Erich Auerbach’s sadly premature death before completing my application, it did not deter me. I am glad it didn’t. For, thanks to the intercession of René Wellek, who had been a friend of Auerbach’s, I was asked by Marie Auerbach to spend a few hours each week helping her to organize her husband’s papers. Of course I was far too young and inexperienced to really make the most of this incredible opportunity to benefit from his Nachlaß. I do remember being fascinated by the personal copies he kept of his published articles. Each offprint would be labeled Handexemplar (“personal copy”), as though he anticipated that someone else would be going through his things. Some offprints would be labeled “not for republication,” whereas others, which he apparently intended to reissue in revised form, would be copiously annotated in his meticulous handwriting with references that he must have intended to follow up. If I was too callow to benefit from the chance to learn more from this intimate exposure to Auerbach’s papers, I did derive great pleasure from the warmth of Marie Auerbach’s hospitality. We conversed in French, which she spoke well. Her reminiscences inevitably evoked Berlin of the Weimar era, on the one hand, but also the years in Istanbul, about which she had mixed feelings. I recall asking one day – somewhat crassly as it seems to me in retrospect, though she seemed to welcome the question at the time – if they were well-off in Berlin. “Ah oui, nous étions extrêmement aisés dans notre vie,” she said with a sigh: “Yes, we were extremely well-off.” That conversation from so many years ago came back to me with poignancy and an entirely new understanding of its implications when I read the letters edited by Martin Elsky, Robert Stein, and Martin Vialon and published in PMLA last spring.1 In a letter dated June 22, 1946, to Martin Hellweg, his former doctoral

Seeing Food: An Anthropology of Ekphrasis, and Still Life in Classical and Medieval Examples

From classical antiquity to the present, food has provided a vehicle, a pretext, or a theme for bringing together in a single, ambivalent space such diverse aspects of human experience as the private and the public, the lofty and the low, the virtuous and the licentious. The symposion or convivium in classical antiquity and the feast in medieval Europe became vehicles for philosophical and imaginative writing. Eating (including communal drinking) is one of the few social acts, perhaps the only one, that combines the private, the intimate, and the gregarious in a manner that permits artists to maneuver between the various options, from ritual solemnity to the carnivalesque. Visual and verbal art were not slow to develop the

Eugene Vance 1934-2011

Eugene Vance, Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle, died May 14, 2011, when a plane he was piloting crashed at Arlington Municipal Airport near Seattle. Vance joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1990. Raised in Newton, Massachusetts, Vance discovered his lifelong passion for medieval literature at Dartmouth College—where he was also an accomplished skier—from which he obtained his B.A. in 1957. He studied for his doctorate at Cornell University, which awarded him the Ph.D. in 1964. From 1962 to 1969, he taught English and French at Yale University. He subsequently taught at the Université de Montréal and at Emory University before moving to Seattle. Vance also held visiting professorships at the Universities of Toronto, Johns Hopkins, California at Berkeley, Duke, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Vance published five books: Reading the Song of Roland (1972), L’Archéologie du signe, co-edited with Lucie Brind’Amour (1983), Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (1986), From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages (1987), The Dragon and the Unicorn: The Rhetoric and Discourse of Power in Premodern Court Culture, co-edited with David Knechtges (2002). He also edited volume 45 of Yale French Studies, Language as Action, in 1970.

Global Language or Universal Language?: From Babel to the Illustrious Vernacular

Globalization is a “hot topic.” While language figures prominently in debates, its complexity defies descriptions of globalization adequate for other subjects. Increasingly diverse ethnicity in nation states alters the status of once dominant vernaculars—what Dante called the parlar materno—as factors of cultural and social cohesion. Language and religion, rather than nation, now serve as elective markers of identity. Inevitably, however, to assert global status for a language conveys overtones of linguistic, and thus cultural, hegemony. From this perspective, Carl Schmitt’s dictum that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” resonates in the sphere of language. For when Schmitt refers to modern concepts of state as theological in origin, his thought speaks directly to the concept of global language. For “global” is only a slightly attenuated variant of “universal,” whose totalizing connotation we find somewhat embarrassing today. And yet, historically, the myth of a lost universal language has played an important role in traditional cultures that value creation accounts. The latter evoke a mythic moment, in illo tempore, when all humans spoke a common language for the simple reason that the origin of the one implicated the emergence of the other. Perhaps no one thought so profoundly about the question of global or universal language in this sense as Dante Alighieri in his philosophical treatise on the illustrious vernacular, the De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1304 CE, DVE). Unlike proponents of global language today who seek to extrapolate a (pre)dominant language from among hundreds of dialects, Dante recognized multilingualism as an historical contingency, a product of the linguistic fall at Babel. At that point, universal language—the speech co-created by God and the first man in Genesis—disappeared, fractured into linguistic shards representing the diversity of human culture. Dante’s anthropology of language thus imitates the division of the first human into an infinite series, each unit different from others, but all containing an originary “DNA,” identified in Genesis 1:26–27 as divine similitude. Likewise, Dante proposes that all human language possess a common “deep structure,” a set of principles for a universal grammar that act as the formal cause of language. Dante calls this capacity for language the forma locutionis, the innate capacity for speech, which defines humans. For Dante, only the vernacular or mother tongue can embody this essence. Jointly created by God and the first man, it has the potential to incarnate the highest aspiration of human speech, the volgare illustre or illustrious vernacular. Although Dante lays out his anthropology of the vernacular in De vulgare eloquentia—arguing that one must look to the most refined vernacular poetry for examples—he defers demonstrating the concept fully until Purgatorio and Paradiso. There he deploys text networks invoking Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and diverse vernacular poets and philosophers to showcase the volgare illustre as a universal vernacular—a forma locutionis in which the meaning, aura, and affect of speaking take precedence over language of origin.

Doomed Discourse: Debating Monotheisms Pre- and Post-Modern

Western Cultures appear to be caught in a paradoxical split between unbridled secularism and an unparalleled outpouring of books, articles, Op-Ed pieces, blogs, and talk shows dealing with religious issues. Were the phenomenon confined to the public in general, it would occasion little surprise, since there is ample testimony—in America, at least—that religion is no longer “the opiate of the masses,” as Marx claimed, but something more akin to “a political action lobby.” Nothing new there, perhaps. What is news is the prominence attained by “religion” in critical studies during the last decade when it has even become a frequent topic of course offerings in humanities departments. But as recently as 1994, it was still a novelty for mainstream theory. We sense this clearly in Jacques Derrida’s bemused irony at finding himself addressing the question of “religion” in his opening remarks for a conference on the subject held that year on Capri:

The Medieval “Author”: An Idea Whose Time Hadn’t Come?

The term “author” has become so much a part of our vocabulary and literary attitude that it’s natural to feel that it must always have been so. As Heidegger says: “The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other.”1 Since the Renaissance, the author has been conceived as the professional “literary figure” who writes works according to conventions, which he both internalizes and transforms to make an “original” creation. Literary criticism, theory, and history were bound to consider the work and the author together.