No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Heterogeneity […] was a function of hegemony. The open-ended inclusiveness of the United States was directly proportionate to America’s capacity to incorporate and exclude , and more precisely to incorporate by exclusion. The culture seemed indefinite, infinitely processual, because as America it closed everything else out, as being either Old World and/or not-yet-America. And vice versa: the process by which it closed out everything un-American was also the spur toward an ideal of liberal inclusiveness, a vision of representative openness that eroded traditional barriers of nationality, territory, language, and ethnicity, and eventually, perhaps, would erode even the barriers of race and gender […]. Sacvan Bercovitch, “Discovering America” (1996) In 1933 Alois Brandl, Professor of English at the University of Berlin, reviewed The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer , published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin (Boston) and earlier in the same year in Britain by Oxford University Press. In his review, Brandl expresses his astonishment at the publication of an edition of Chaucer by “the biggest publisher in English studies” compiled by someone he does not know: Who is F. N. Robinson? Minerva calls him a professor of English at Harvard; one seeks his name unsuccessfully in the English studies bibliographies. But he must be a diligent reader and compiler of that which others have written about Chaucer […] and must have access to a wonderful library […]. Brandl’s astonished condescension was not based on inexperience. Even at the age of seventy-eight, he was the chair of his department and the Nestor of English studies in the German-speaking world. In the 1870s and 1880s, he studied in Berlin and Vienna with the founders of English and German philology, Wilhelm Scherer, Karl Müllenhoff, Julius Zupitza, Jakob Schipper, and Erich Schmidt, and he later held positions at the universities of Vienna, Prague, Göttingen, Strassburg, and Berlin. His list of achievements includes studies on some of the major authors from the Middle English through the Romantic periods (e.g., Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge), the essay on “English Philology” for the compendious tome Die deutschen Universitäten , through which the German universities proudly exhibited German academic accomplishments for the 1893 Chicago World Exposition, a hefty history of English literature, and the editorship of the prestigious Shakespeare Jahrbuch and Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen .
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.