Description
Book SynopsisNineteenth-century German classical philology underpins many structures of the modern humanities. This book shows how a language of love and a longing for closeness with a personified antiquity has lastingly shaped modern professional reading habits, notions of biography, and the self-image of scholars and teachers.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: feeling and philology; 1. The potter's daughter: longing, Bildung, and the self; 2. From the symposium to the seminar: language of love and language of institutions; 3. 'So that he unknowingly and delicately mirrors himself in front of us, as the beautiful often do': Schleiermacher's Plato; 4. 'Enthusiasm dwells only in one-sidedness': knowledge of antiquity and professional philology; 5. 'The most instructive form in which we encounter an understanding of life': the age of biography; 6. The life of the Centaur: Wilamowitz, biography, Nietzsche; Epilogue: on keeping a distance.
