Aural philology: Herder hears Homer singing

Abstract

In 1769, Johann Gottfried Herder describes a private reading experience of a remarkably paradoxical nature. He tells us that he can only read ‘his’ Homer properly when he hears Homer singing Greek, while silently reading and translating by means of his German thoughts and mother tongue. Herder’s performative reading is anchored in what I call aural philology, a method innovative in its emphasis on the aural dimension in reconstructively imagining historical epochs. It is one which demarcates cultural difference through practices of listening and their remediation into reading. The problem, for Herder, is how to constitute the particularity of the German people even in affective acts of reading that, however momentarily, suspend cultural differentiation through effects of presence. I distinguish Herder’s philology from Vico and others who emphasized the oral origins of the Homeric epic, along with recent theories of philology as an affective, aurally mediated process. The article is an alternative view on the role of media in enlightenment theories of literature and culture separate from Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Herder’s aural philology identifies a moment in the history of aurality and cultural difference, one that does not move fixedly towards modernity.