Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History and the Human

1. Vico and Philological Criticism

3 Vico and Philological Criticism Those who occupy the heights of power yearn for the immense and the infinite. Giambattista Vico, On the 5tudy Methods ofOur Time Beg叫g in 喇 叭eapolitan thinker and critic, Gω 泊 m 叫 m 帥咖心叫 bat 圳 batti 扯耐 t 仗耐 tist 川∞ opened each acade 凹 mic year at the University of Naples with an “勻 Inaugura 叫 al Oration" delivered on October 18, the Feast Day of St. Luke. As Professor of Rhetoric, it was his job to introduce new university students to the nature, aims, and traditions of education while at the same time elaborating his own everdeepening sense of its components, purposes, and ideals His speech of 1708 was special for several reasons and in many ways. It was lengthier, more formal, and more elaborate because he aimed it not only at his students but also direct1y to those in power. In 1月7， as part of the Europe-wide "War of Spanish Succession" (1月1-14)， Austria had driven Spain from control of Naples - a mark of the Spanish Empire's decline - and the University's administration had decided to dedicate the opening academic ceremonies of 1708 to the new imperial ruler. Vico delivered his lecture, On the 5tudy Methods of Our Time, before the Austrian Emperor's representative who embodied the all too secular competition between Joseph 1 and the Vatican. The Austrian Viceroy and Captain General of Naples was Vincenzo Cardinal Grimani, whom Pope Clement XI considered excommunicating for representing the Habsburgs' interests with too much enthusiasm.1 Keeping this setting in mind steadies our sense of Vico's political interests in this lecture that is so evidently concerned with educational theory and human anthropology. Vico laid out for the city's political as well as intellectual and academic elites a daring and expansive prospect of the pedagogic and civil purposes of intellectual method within the university and the city to which it belonged.2 2 Poetry against Torture: Criticism, H的 tory， and the Human Nearly three hundred years later, faced with the welcome opportunity to speak under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts to an audience including postgraduates whose auditing credits them with study in method, 1start a series of lectures by invoking Vico's grand accomplishment. 1 do so not because we are older and wiser and more modern than he - that is, not to correct or admonish - but also not because we should or can only be his poor echo, merely an anxious shadow of his original greatness. 1 bring Vico before you to start this series of talks because he is an essential figure in supporting and elaborating the small cadre of loving intellectual workers who study criticism, poesis, and power hoping to make something permanent of humanity's historical potential. The cadre is small but impressive, including Plato, Machiavelli, Aristotle, and Bacon for Vico and, for us, as 1will suggest in succeeding talks, Erich Auerbach, Edward Said, William Empson, and others. Although Vico's great work is the final edition of The New Science (1744), an exceedingly original, inventive, and difficult expression of a lifetime's reflection on poetry, education, law, philosophy, and politics, 1will speak mostly about the 1708 oration, De r叫tri temporis studiorum r 叩日 at叩 1 叮片可 1 切加 fη m η le 叫 t 吋 ).31 have two reasons fo 凹 rt 血 hi 站 s choice: f 晶 lr 可 "S 討 t， Vico's lecture is an excellent model and second, it anticipates a great deal of what follows in his career. With some additions and qualifications, we can maintain faith with his accomplishments. All critical humanists must study Vico so they might decide if they will embrace not all the details of his program but the basic historical and aesthetic principles of his method and thinking. My aim is to encourage you to take him very seriously as an interlocutor in our collective work on and with literatures and literary cultures. 1 will contend throughout these lectures that literary humanists, scholars, and critics devoted to the litterae humaniores should think of themselves in ways that are now rather uncommon, unfashionable, and institutionally difficult to imagine and maintain. If we literary humanists do not know Vico well, we diminish our capacities and contribute to a cultural amnesia the effect of which is nothing less than barbarism. Vico himself and the tradition of work he exemplifies offer moral, intellectual, and political resources that our societies need and that, for the most par Vico and Philological Criticism...