:Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism

On the other hand, the alternative offered by Romantic and post-Romantic philologists was hardly an uncomplicated step forward. The naturalization of language might have allowed writers and theorists of language a chance to bypass the colonizing ambit of abstraction, but an organic vision attuned to plants and roots also smoothed the way for racial determinism and the “insidious forms of nineteenth-century race science” (5). As Wolff notes, Ferdinand de Saussure and Franz Boaz’s later attempts “to re-create the study of language as a social science” was motivated by a racialization of language that is often traced back to Romanticism itself (47). Wolff’s object is to think about Romantic writers who resisted this dichotomy by belaboring a linguistic actualism sustained by broader understandings of time itself.