Philology’s Deep History

Abstract The story of David Damrosch’s Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age is inextricably bound to the story of the past twelve years of the Institute for World Literature. Many of the ideas the book puts forth were created and developed through the network of people and ideas IWL brings together. I will briefly look at three ideas developed through IWL that underlie Comparing the Literatures and then I will argue that David Damrosch’s distinctive approach to comparative and world literature is philology’s deep history, in the footsteps of Auerbach’s 1951 essay Philologie der Weltliteratur . I will look at David Damrosch’s commitment to philology’s deep history throughout his career, from What Is World Literature? to Comparing the Literatures and I will illustrate it with a few case studies of my own.