Introduction: Philology in a New Key

Abstract

This book is about the volatility of some late medieval and early modern words and the “forms of life” to which they testify. It is also about the conditions under which the interpretation of verbal texts and social experience can take place. For “the boy,” as he is called in Doctorow’s novel, the world seems to “compose and recompose itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction,” and he responds to the recomposition with wonder and wide-eyed pleasure, but what response is available to scholars and teachers concerned with historically distant texts? What does the prevailing mix of theories and methods offer to cope with the simultaneous imperatives to see texts as part of a complex social formation, to recognize the fluidity of that formation, and to hear “last year’s words” and “next year’s” as spoken in different social voices?

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

The boy did not know he was hearing Ovid, and it would not have mattered if he had known. Grandfather’s stories proposed to him that the forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could as easily be something else. The old man’s narrative would often drift from English to Latin without his being aware of it … so that it appeared nothing was immune to the principle of volatility, not even language.

E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime