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Chapter 5 - ‘The Most Instructive Form in Which We Encounter an Understanding of Life’
Constanze Güthenke, University of Oxford
Book:

Feeling and Classical Philology

Published online:

28 February 2020

Print publication:

05 March 2020, pp 129-161
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Summary

The fifth chapter considers the narrative overlap of disciplinary filiation and the biographical. It does so through readings of Carl Justi’s biography of Winckelmann and Wilhelm Dilthey’s biographical work on Schleiermacher. Both were begun in the 1870s within a web of hermeneutic thinking about the biographical that characterized the Geisteswissenschaften and reflected back into the study of ancient biographical materials, too, and rendered scholars and their subject matter coextensive.

Chapter 6 - The Life of the Centaur
Constanze Güthenke, University of Oxford
Book:

Feeling and Classical Philology

Published online:

28 February 2020

Print publication:

05 March 2020, pp 162-193
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Summary

The sixth chapter examines, against this background, the claims to biographical possibilities as a key to modern scholarship itself, such as were raised by Wilamowitz in his works on Plato, Plutarch, Greek lyric, tragedy, and Pindar. By juxtaposing Nietzsche’s own work on ancient biography, I allow the similarities of the concerns raised, rather than the difference in answers, to come to the fore.

Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, 1770–1920
Constanze Güthenke
Published online:

28 February 2020

Print publication:

05 March 2020
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Nineteenth-century German classical philology underpins many structures of the modern humanities. In this book, Constanze Güthenke shows how a language of love and a longing for closeness with a personified antiquity have lastingly shaped modern professional reading habits, notions of biography, and the self-image of scholars and teachers. She argues that a discourse of love was instrumental in expressing the challenges of specialisation and individual formation (Bildung), and in particular for the key importance of a Platonic scene of learning and instruction for imagining the modern scholar. The book is based on detailed readings of programmatic texts from, among others, Wolf, Schleiermacher, Boeckh, Thiersch, Dilthey, Wilamowitz and Nietzsche. It makes a case for revising established narratives, but also for finding new value in imagining distance and an absence of nostalgic longing for antiquity.