Arcade: A Digita 

Menu

 / On Being a Medievalist and More / Interview with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Interview

Interview with Hans Ulrich

Gumbrecht
By Marisa Galvez
medieval studies literary studies Stanford Historiography

M arisa Galvez: What has been the place of medieval

studies in your pursuit of main concepts and questions
throughout your career, such as presence, belatedness, and
even in your writings about sports?

Sepp Gumbrecht: You know how grateful and enthusiastic I

am, and how inspiring I found this 1967 colloquium in February.
Although the colloquium was about my work, that is not the
reason why I thought it was so good, or why I was so
enthusiastic about it, precisely because in the end it was not
just about me and my work. However, if there were one thing
about my work that I would have liked to be more directly
visible is that influence of medieval studies. You talked about
it, and Heather [Webb] talked about it, but you are official
medievalists. I would say that nothing of the books I have
written and of the ideas I had—if ever I was able to make an
impact through them—has not been inspired by medieval
studies. Neither do I say that with a regret, nor do I mean that I
should have remained a medievalist, nor am I saying this
because I feel obliged to say it. To elaborate more on it, I will
give you a couple of examples. I believe that the entire
intuition of Production of Presence, as well as the one that
drove me in The Powers of Philology and in Atmosphere, Mood,
Stimmung, and even ultimately In Praise of Athletic Beauty, are
related to my previous work as a medievalist. This is a kind of a
syndrome that shows in these four books, in which I work
through these three or four dimensions of life—presence,
atmosphere, beauty and the body. This syndrome includes a
skepticism against a Schleiermacher- and Gadamer-type of
hermeneutics, which I think would have never emerged in my
work without me having started out as a medievalist.

As far as presence is concerned, both the phenomena that I

wanted to write about and the definition that I propose in
Production of Presence, of course, are directly taken out of the
medieval theology of the Eucharist, the Pre-Reformation
theology of the Eucharist. Although I am not officially a
philosopher, that book is clearly a philosophical book and it
wants to be a philosophical book, whose intuitions are drawn
from medieval theology. And the intuition was there, it is
almost embarrassing to say, in the Aristotelian concept of the
symbolon, as opposed to the Saussurean concept of the sign,
the concept where the symbolon, or the sign, is substance and
form, as opposed to signified and signifier. I don’t think this
would have ever been so important to me had I not become a
medievalist. And we could perhaps say that I would not have
become a medievalist had I not grown up in a Catholic cultural
environment. I will add one thing: if my parents had been
terribly Catholic, Catholicism and medieval theology would not
have been so interesting to me. Strangely, my parents obliged
me to go to church, to be an altar boy, to be very Catholic, but
they were not terribly convinced themselves about religion.
They probably thought that it was just good for me culturally.
And this was the friction: not having ever been part of Catholic
culture, but simultaneously being part of it while seeing it
from outside. Until the present day I have a huge sympathy [for
Catholic culture]. I would never defend the Catholic Church
and Catholic culture as a phenomenon altogether, and their
many negative things. But I hardly go to Rome without going to
the Vatican, as I like this environment.

Nevertheless, to talk once again about presence—the concept

and not the book. I would also say that the basic question I was
pursuing in Production of Presence emerged in another book of
mine, In 1926: Living on the Edge of Time. This book was not
only my first book written at Stanford, but the book that—if I
look back today—marks the beginning of my ideas making a
difference. I think that, if people associate anything from the
books I have written over the past two or three decades with
me as a scholar now, it had started with In 1926.

MG: That’s the first book I read of yours.

SG: Yeah, of course. In that book—and this is not so visible—I

inherited a question from Marc Bloch, from his La Société
Feodale. The two projects were completely different, and yet
Marc Bloch’s question in La Société Feodale is the same I had in
In 1926: whether you can describe medieval culture
synchronically. For Marc Bloch, that meant the first feudal
systems and the second feudal systems being described
together. Each of the two parts of this book are descriptions of
a synchronic system. Not of one year, like In 1926, but
nevertheless a synchronic description. And the question I was
really pursuing—and I had been happily pursuing it for a long
time before I wrote In 1926 and before the idea of an
alphabetical order for the book’s chapters had crossed my
mind—was: how can one, and I am deliberately using these
words, conjure the past in a non-narrative way. I say in a non-
narrative way, because a narrative way would inevitably imply
soft causality. I mean soft causality as in the Latin proposition
post hoc propter hoc. In that sense, describing a phenomenon
or a time synchronically is Bloch’s question too.

Now, with In Praise of Athletic Beauty—and that’s the real title,

though it has many translations, and some of the translated
titles are horrible, like “In praise of sports.” It is not “In praise
of sports,” but In Praise of Athletic Beauty. In that book, I was
writing about the aesthetic appreciation of a bodily
performance that does not have to imply that this bodily
performance expresses anything in terms of meaning or
concepts. This dimension of expression that does not achieve a
meaning, once again, I believe, is something that I would have
probably never found an angle to tackle it had it not been for
the middle ages—even though its main inspiration is that I’ve
always been a sports fan.

I will give you one last example, the first real book project that
I will start post-retirement has the provisional title Mystical
Bodies. This project is not a rehabilitation of crowds, but
something like saying that crowds are not only negative, so
that I can describe a type of sociability that sociology has
always overlooked, namely when people are just being
together, like in a stadium, when a Pope gives a mass, or a
public viewing of a sports event, when people are not
necessarily interested in the sports event that is being
broadcasted, but they want to be together. It is not random
that the only concept that I can find to refer to that
phenomenon is the earliest self-description and self-reference
of medieval Christianity, as Christ’s mystical body.
Finally, if we twist your question in a negative way, I seem to
be incapable to have any good idea, or any idea capable of
producing resonance, which in the end I will not discover that
“well, well, well, although I wanted to do something really new, it
is all set in my medievalist’s beginnings.” What I say about it has
nothing to do with better or worse, whether the ideas are
better if they can’t be traceable to an academic origin, but it is
quite interesting that it seems so. Of course, I hope that what
I’m describing “autobiographically,” is similar to one of those
cases, as it is with [Paul] Zumthor and [Hugo] Kuhn. Zumthor
always remained the great medievalist he was, but he also has
a fantastic book on Amsterdam in the 17th century. And while
he always continued to be a medievalist—the same is true for
Kuhn, and for others as well—, this was not a limitation of his
intellectual horizon.

To conclude on a note about nowadays, I want to clarify that I

am not making a systematic argument about medievalism or
medievalist origins being better, which I think one could ever
run with, but maybe that is a concluding favorable statement
for the study of medieval culture in an environment where
more and more students, who want to do literature, see
literature as synonymous with contemporary literature,
spanning a maximum of 30 or 40 years past. I somewhat
regret that it is the case, where Ulysses by [James] Joyce or
[Marcel] Proust’s work would be too far away. In such an
environment, I think that this inspiring otherness from
medieval times, this inspiring resistance that the period
imposes on us, and this hermeneutic difficulty—maybe even
the impossibility—of accessing medieval culture should be
emphasized because it is so different and not readily
accessible. It is probably your experience and my experience
as instructors, that we will not have the greatest enrollments
in this present environment, but it can be something
fascinating when, in a college context with particularly
intelligent people, students may profit during a short time
from what we are teaching, in a way that helps them develop
their minds. And if they then continue writing code, become
politicians, or investment bankers, it is all fine with me. I’ve
nothing on earth against it, but this resistance imposed by the
time, and working against this difficulty, is something we
should cultivate.

MG: This is my favorite question. As you were speaking about

Kuhn earlier, can you talk a little bit about his influence on your
work, especially in terms of medieval culture and texts? Do
you see a genealogy of scholarship revolving around Kuhn?
Maybe you could say a few words about how he was like, how
he was in a classroom.

SG: As I guess we say in American English, I think I ran into

Kuhn in my third or fourth semester. I had started with
Germanistik, German Studies, and Romanistik, as they say in
Germany for Romance Studies or Romance Philology. I must
say that, after the first three semesters, I was so disappointed
with the two fields that I was about to say “Ok, I do something
reasonable.” I would have probably studied Law, which I still
think I wouldn’t have been bad at. Anyway… Back then, when I
was still in doubt, I attended this Vorlesung by Kuhn on the
medieval Tristan topic—Hugo Kuhn, who had a certain aura, as
he was a big deal, and although I remember the topic, I don’t
know what the title was. That lecture was a real turning point,
not so much in the sense of giving me the feeling “Oh, there
was a method, a way of doing things,” but more so in the sense
that there was this amazingly intelligent and engaging person
who was the Vorleser. The course ran twice a week, forty-five
minutes for each lecture. In a way, I wanted to be like him, even
knowing that I wouldn’t have ever been like him, but the
thought I had was: “If that is possible in the humanities, in
literary studies, then it is worth doing it.” It is worth doing it still
because you can be exposed to such people and they can be
so inspiring. Also, even if I tried not to copy him or his style, the
idea that I could try to be something like, this type of life
would be existentially worthwhile.

However, in terms of academic genealogy, there is an

awareness of such genealogy that started with Kuhn. I do think
that this notion remains in the closer world of medieval studies
in Germany, which continues to be relatively large and it is kind
of a sub-dimension of German Studies. I think the people of
your generation, a generation in which you’d be very young,
but which includes people from your age up to scholars who
are in their mid-fifties, there are still what you call an
Enkelschüler—the immediate students of Kuhn—and they still
feel that there is a certain “genealogical” coherence. It is in the
nature of such genealogies that they get a little bit blurred,
even when there is an awareness that there was somebody
very, very important, and very charismatic, unique. If I ask
myself in what way he was important for me, I would start with
something that has nothing to do specifically with medieval
studies. It is much more about a way of being inspiring as an
instructor and as a scholar, which Florian Klinger at our
colloquium (After 1967) tried to describe, giving me the honor
of using me as an example. When Florian was giving his paper,
I felt like “This is exactly like Kuhn.” That would be this capacity
of being inspiring not by directly saying “Oh, you are very good
and you can do this and this and this,” but being inspiring in the
sense of not setting any limits. I sometimes say something to
my students that reminds me of Kuhn, although Kuhn had no
way of saying that. I tell them “You shouldn’t try to apply
Foucault’s method or being like Foucault, you should try being
better than Foucault.” It is very unlikely that this will ever
happen, that a student of mine will be better than Foucault,
but Foucault’s work is already out there and why should you
not be the one who perhaps is even better, or do your own
thing, like Foucault did. That was very much the feeling of
Hugo Kuhn.

I’ll give more details, so you can imagine the impact. I was in
the third semester. I was then very much—if there is a German
equivalent—a sophomore, or something like that. Hugo Kuhn
treated me like he treated his doctoral students, and like he
treated his assistant professors—in Germany, assistant
professors are somebody’s assistant—or even like his
colleagues. He treated me the same way as he treated them,
and that was encouraging. Although it could have felt like a
load on my shoulders, it never did. One could say if somebody
expects so much, then this is too much for you to take, that
you cannot bear that. But I did not have that feeling. Instead, I
had a feeling of a freedom, of a space to be conquered. More
importantly, a space to be conquered my way, as with him it
was not about doing academic work his way.

Despite all that freedom, of course, there are certain intuitions

and concepts, which I first heard from him and that I am still
using, although some people now think I’ve invented them.
One of them is this concept of Faszinationstypen. The concept
is about how certain topics are fascinating and they pervade
all different literary and non-literary forms, all the different
genres, in certain historical moments. To give an example: in
the 12th century, the relationship between erotic love and
society. This is precisely fascinating for that time because
there is no stable solution for that. The complimentary
concept to Faszinatiostypen is that of Inszenierungstypen,
which means staging types, or types of “ins-encenation.” That
would be, for example, the ballads in the late middle ages or
early modernity, i.e., the staging form of the ballad which
would be capable of absorbing any fascination with any topic.
When I am explaining these are concepts, they don’t sound
that genius, but that at the time nobody had thought of them.
And that was very, very inspiring.

However, the most inspiring ideas for me were taken from the
moments he was lecturing about medieval troubadour poetry.
He was the great specialist on Walter von der Vogelweide, who
happens to have a specific historical relationship with my
hometown. In my hometown, people claim that the bones and
the grave of Walter von der Vogelweide are in Wurzburg. That
is probably a romantic invention. Nevertheless, his most
influential idea for me was that a performance can never
completely count with an institutionalized situation. That a
performance creates its own situation. Like in our
conversation. This conversation now is different from the
conversation that we had two hours ago, we are reconstituting
it. The speech act theory was not around yet, but this idea that,
whenever you are in an interaction and whenever you are in
communication with someone, you produce something that is
unique to that moment. That, I think, is an important idea, and
that is also an impulse for imagination that has never left me,
which I developed with him. I think it is not very central in my
work philosophically, but it is very central in whatever I am
doing, both by doing it, by creating a classroom and by
creating a seminar, which are always different. Also, the desire
of retrieving that original context of performance, to
reconstruct it, to reconstruct it with a desire to, however
impossible that may be, to become part of that situation in the
past.

MG: To stay on a similar topic, can you talk a little bit about
Zumthor’s influence on your work, and about the colloquium
Materialities of Communication?
SG: This was a colloquium that we organized in a country
which no longer exists, Yugoslavia, with a German colleague
whose work is unfortunately underestimated in this country,
Ludwig Pfeiffer, even though he is an amazing Anglicist. There
were five colloquia I organized in the 1980s. One of them took
place in Yugoslavia, precisely because Yugoslavia was
officially a socialist country, so it belonged to the Warsaw Pact
of the State Socialist countries, with the Soviet Union and so
forth.
MG: What was the date again?

SG: The colloquia were from 1981 to 1989. And this was the
fourth colloquium, which happened in 1987 and was called
Materialities of Communication. That is the only colloquium
whose edited volume is translated, at least a selection of it,
into English. Now, why in Yugoslavia? Because it was the only
country in the world that allowed people from “capitalist
countries,” Western countries I mean, not only to organize
intellectual events, but also to spend Western money there.
Another amazing reason for the colloquium to have happened
there, it was the only country among the state socialist
countries, including East Germany and the Soviet Union, that
had no official reason not to let their own scholars go if they
were invited. We never had more than 5, 6 or 7 people from
officially socialist countries, but it was possible then. Now, this
has little or nothing to do with medieval studies, but the title
materialities of communication does. What was hidden—or
maybe not so hidden after all—behind the title was an anti-
hermeneutic effect we were interested in discussing. The idea
that, while the reconstruction of meaning and attribution of
meaning were still perfectly legitimate operations of reading,
there must be other dimensions of dealing with cultural
artifacts or cultural phenomena that are not circumscribed to
the attribution of meaning. We chose the word materialities
because we were in socialist, and officially Marxist states, and
materiality sounded like a Marxist concept back then. We
never truly had such Marxist intentions, but we thought that
we were successful in playing on them, and that it would have
given a good pretext for people from East Germany, Poland, or
Yugoslavia, and so forth, to participate. That was the specific
environment created in that colloquium.

This was really a dynamite colloquium, in every sense, in my

recollection. In some senses that are not so good for websites,
but I’ll tell you privately one day. That colloquium was the
turning point of my private life too. There were two
protagonists, who may not have been so central for the
colloquium’s organization, but who were, for me, already
important, even more so retrospectively speaking. There were
superstars back then, like Jean-François Lyotard and Niklas
Luhmann, and others. But the two most interesting people, for
the topic of our interview topic and as I remember, were
Friedrich Kittler on the one hand, and Paul Zumthor on the
other. Kittler, who I think, is rightfully considered the founder
of media studies today. He was the first real great mind, who
was interested in media also, and I should say that he invented
a concept we can invoke in French, sensibilité culturelle.
Nobody was interested in broken shellac records, or radio from
the 1930s, or telephones from the 1940s, not before Kittler.
The concept speaks not only to his theories, which he
developed, but to a whole cultural sensitivity that he is famous
for today.

The other influential person was Paul Zumthor, who in the 70s
and 80s went through a very profound epistemological
rebooting and reorientation of his approach, not only to
medieval culture, but mainly to medieval culture. He went from
a thoroughly semiotic to a more performance oriented
approach. His was a very impressive semiotic way of reading,
for if you have a semiotic approach you read everything in
medieval culture in a similar way to Umberto Eco’s style, who
was then the name in semiotics within medieval studies.
However, performance, as he later meant it, stressed not only
the body moving, but also the singing of troubadour songs, or
even writing as performance as well. With very different
cultural sensibilities and intellectual styles, I think these two
colleagues and friends, and amazing scholars, were central for
this colloquium. I don’t say that only because we are talking
about medieval studies, or in any way to rank them today, but
in my personal ranking I think Zumthor was the number one,
precisely because he was more open and less fixated on his
own view of things.

To explain more what I have been saying, even if it may sound

strange, as it would require more explanation than what I am
about to present. I think that the greatness of Friedrich Kittler
was his mythographic talent. He could invent stories and
histories about very counterintuitive theses. For example, that
each great mediatic invention comes out of a war situation. Do
I believe that? No. But the idea served to weave fantastic
stories and to develop very provocative theses. I think that
people who have been working against these theses have
been as important as people working for them. He was also
not the best speaker. Indeed, he triggered amazing
discussions, but once he had read his manuscript with the
speed of light, and he wanted to smoke a cigarette after it, it
was no longer interesting. On the contrary, Zumthor had a
natural talent, what you call in German, Weltoffenheit. He was
interested in people, something I think we share. These people
don’t have to be as brilliant as you are. Of course, when I have
a student like you, it is very special, but you know, I am also
interested in people with much more normal, limited, middle-
level talents (who should perhaps never have been admitted to
a place like Stanford). Zumthor had that broad interest in
people and ideas too. So, it was not about saying who was
better or worse, but these were the two central protagonists,
and this is why I return to them at the end of the introduction
to my book, Production of Presence, and that would be the
philological proof of what I am saying, of the impact they had
on that colloquium.

As I have said before, that book would have never happened

without my beginning in medieval studies—I wrote in the
introduction what I am just saying now—and it would not have
happened without this colloquium, as Production of Presence,
published almost 20 years later, was the redemption of the
basic intuition of that colloquium about materiality of
communication. They both share the desire of being more than
just this Oedipal resistance against hermeneutics, they both
wanted to offer an alternative. Not an alternative that
completely rejected any interpretation. Of course, that would
be idiotic. But I do think that Production of Presence has had
the success it has had because it says, “ok, this is a different
way of dealing with cultural artifacts.” Again, not in the sense
that you can’t or shouldn’t interpret. There’s the written proof
of what I was saying about the various influences on my work
in general, in the introduction to that book, where I invoked
several friends, colleagues, and scholars. One of the two most
important colleagues is Zumthor, and I would actually say the
most important one. Although we started with Kuhn, he was
dead by the time the colloquium took place. On a side note, it
was actually interesting that Zumthor had never met Kuhn
personally. When I met Zumthor, I thought he was like me,
maybe that the first communication that we had. I was
convinced that he was a completely hors de série, unusual, and
inspiring medievalist.

By the way, to finish with your question about Zumthor with an

anecdote, his nephew, Peter Zumthor, is one of the signature
architects of our times. And I owe that I am friends with Peter
Zumthor to the fact that Peter Zumthor had never seen his
uncle. Somebody told Peter that I had been friends with his
uncle. I was at a colloquium in Zürich at the ETH, and all of a
sudden “wow, that’s Peter Zumthor,” and he just came to me
and said, “you know, yes, I bought one of your books, Production
of Presence, it was very interesting, but I really want to know
about my uncle.”
MG: How come he didn’t know about his uncle?

SG: Because the Zumthors are, what we call in Swiss,

Baselbieter, not from the city of Basel, but from the
countryside of Basel, so their first language would have been
German. Like Federer, the great tennis player. But for some
reason, and I don’t know why, Paul’s father moved to Geneva
so early in his life that Paul’s native language was neither
Hochdeutsch nor Swiss German, but French. Then, his
intellectual career developed mainly in France. He was for a
short time in Leipzig, in Germany, before the end of World War
II. It is interesting that—maybe because he came from outside
—he has never had any official intellectual recognition in
France. To put it bluntly, because they were both there,
everybody knew that Paul was much better than Daniel
Poirion, for example. Unfortunately, Poirion was the one whom
we rate the best. Nevertheless, the chair at the Sorbonne was
Poirion, which meant that Paul Zumthor would not have had
the chance to go to Collège de France. He ended his academic
career not in Amsterdam, or in France, but in Montréal. As
later in life Paul became the author of very respectable
historical novels, and an even better one of poetry in French,
today he is considered one of the great twentieth century
authors of littérature Quebecoise. I think this anecdote about
his career shows Paul’s openness, which I was speaking about.
He was, I think, the greatest literary medievalist of the
twentieth century, and you see I like rankings. At the same
time, he was much more than just a medievalist. But much
more because he was a medievalist.

MG: Can you speak about the milieu or the atmosphere of

Stanford when René Girard, Michel Serres, you, Brigitte
Cazelle, Jeffrey Schnapp and Robert Harrison were still here?
Can you talk about a certain time when those kind of
medievalists were here? Were there specific intellectual
exchanges that come to mind, which emerged from this
community at a certain time at Stanford?

SG: If that atmosphere were not so specific to Stanford at that

time, and if it would have interested other people than us at
Stanford, this would be almost an anthology. Describing the
contrast between the type of intellectual sociability that took
place at Stanford then, within the humanities, and compare it
to today’s, this description shows an amazing contrast. If I look
at the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages today, I
think our strength—maybe not just at the DLCL, but within the
humanities at large, although there are ups and downs—is an
enormous homogeneity of quality that exists today. I am
speaking about a generation, in which you are the tail end,
which includes people who are 10 to 15 years older than you
are, the middle career-generation.

On a very practical note, and I will be honest, when I came to

Stanford in 1989, when students would tell me “I’m going to
take a course with professor X,” there were always moments in
which, without wanting to hurt Professor X and without
creating a scandal, I wanted to politely tell them “this is a
waste of your time, to take that.” At Stanford, especially in the
foreign language philology departments, to call them the
German way, like French, like Italian, Russian, and so forth,
there were colleagues whose only merit was that they were
native speakers. To say it in a parodic form, they were native
speakers and had once or twice read a book in their lives.
Simultaneously, we had a couple of superstars, which felt
weird in the same context.

I start with the most famous, because he was in the English

department, Ian Watt. Due to The Rise of the Novel, he was still
referred to as one of the greatest Anglicists of all times.
Moreover, we had towering figures like René Girard, Michel
Serres, John Freccero, whose work I am not terribly fond of,
but who’s important. From outside, even before I came to
Stanford, after I had got an offer, I was asking myself “Is this a
place I really want to go?” One the one hand, there were all
these giants, who were all good and fantastic. On the other,
there was not much in between the starts and the other type
of colleagues. I think that this gap is what has really
disappeared in the past 25, or 30 years. Which leads me to say
that this has been a very, very exciting trajectory at Stanford.

But was there much conversation between those stars and us,
the younger people? Between Serres and Girard and Robert
Harrison, or Brigitte? She was a bit older than us, but she was
not on the same generation as Girard, certainly not in terms of
visibility, even if I think she was a terrific colleague. Indeed,
there was not much of a conversation. There was rather an
encouragement, and an underlying reason to be proud of, to
have them here and to be at the same university where Michel
Serres was teaching. Do I think that he had much of an impact
on Stanford colleagues or Stanford students? Unfortunately,
not. But the fact that he was here, would come every year, and
somehow would find that environment interesting enough, was
encouraging.

On the contrary, René was more dedicated to Stanford. He was

a very successful undergraduate instructor, which was not the
case with the graduate students. Perhaps because he had a
hard time understanding why anybody would not agree with
him. I am not saying that as an aggressive criticism. He was so
deeply convinced that he was always right. I mean, if you have
a book title, which is not self-ironic and says “Things hidden in
literature since the beginning of the world,” and if this is your
theory, you are not the best person to tease out what a
graduate student has to say. Nevertheless, the fact was that
he was here, that he was the most present among the
superstars.
As for Robert Harrison, Girard and Serres—and he pretends
that Freccero too—were important to him, even though I don’t
see any traces of their influence in Robert’s work. Robert
Harrison, whom I consider one of the greatest humanists in the
world today, I would even go so far as to say second to none, is
definitely the great Dantist and Italianist. For the younger
among us, maybe their presence had a different value, for
Patricia Parker, who was brought to Stanford a year before I
was, myself, I think that for Roland [Greene] too. For those
people, myself included, their presence was like a statement
that it is possible to live at this university as a humanist, which
was then a more technical university. Once again, I am not
saying that it was a problem. I am and was perfectly happy
with that. In that sense, I think we had a different development
than the humanities at MIT. And that different development
may have to do—and this is the final dimension of this
question—with this emerging community of superstars and of
younger scholars, for whom medieval studies was an
intersection, either for random reasons or not. You could easily
say that it was the intersection, indeed. Even though, to my
knowledge, Girard had never written about the Middle Ages.
He was just finishing his Shakespeare book then. I think that, if
you work on Shakespeare, the medieval period is somehow
there.

MG: Which book was he finishing at the time?

SG: Le fruit de la passion. One could say the same for Serres. I
think that the earliest he had ever been teaching was Leibniz,
or La Fontaine, but Serres and Girard were people classy
enough to find the medieval period interesting. I think that,
when you came here, Stanford was already different from
what I am describing. Today, considering you are now a
colleague—and I have seen how your colleagues think of you
internationally—it seems that this was a good environment to
grow. Medieval studies mattered, and perhaps it could have
never been so taken for granted as with other universities. As I
was comparing medieval studies to Classics, it is interesting in
that sense that today we have the number one Classics,
especially Ancient Greek, department in the world. And that
was also absolutely not the case in 1989. Something must
have made it happen, considering the institutional
improbability of that to happen—happen in an interesting way.
A way in which nothing, no field was ever guaranteed, a way in
which—now I am referring to Robert Harrison as a Dantist—
people would either not listen to you talk about Dante at all, or
you were so good that Dante became a central fascination—
and Dante is very established at Stanford today. There are a
few undergraduates, whatever they are majoring in, who have
not heard about Dante.

MG: How do you view the impact of the Grundriss der

Romanischen Literaturen des Mitteralters on medieval studies
in America and then Europe?

SG: If you seriously ask what impact have they had… well, no,
they haven’t had any impact. Although I ended up inheriting it
from my academic adviser [Hans R. Jauss] and from Erich
Köhler, and although I invested a lot of time and effort in the
Grundriss during a couple of years, to make it dramatic, I think
the impact is zero.
MG: Why?

SG: In all of them you find some gems. I am not saying they are
not important, but interesting publications are sometimes not
as impactful on the environment in which they were produced.
I will give you an example from the Stanford Italian Review
that has absolutely nothing to do with medieval studies.
There’s one special issue about the reception of Nietzsche in
Italy. There was probably no other country where Nietzsche
had an early resonance. In fact, the reception happened much
earlier than in Germany. The issue on Nieztsche was edited by
the young Robert Harrison. It is fantastic, it is a pet-book, it
lies behind my desk at home, and it is really important for me. I
hope that, for me at least, this William IX essay, which you
were talking about, which came out in the Grundriss, was
important. I refer students to it sometimes, because there is
something about Kuhn’s spirit about performance, about those
situations in medieval times, and how they could have been.
On a side note, it is interesting that we published, in the
Stanford Literature Review, some of the essays from a
colloquium that I organized in my first year at Stanford. The
colloquium happened in the spring of 1990, and it was
dedicated to a concept that was very hot back then, mainly
due to the influence of Deconstruction: writing, écriture,
Schriftzug.
Although these are interesting publications, one could actually
look at them and ask an interesting question: why has this
resonance not happened? Within the Humanities, both with
serial publications and with Stanford University Press,
Stanford has never had an impact that would correspond to
what I see as a very positive development of the humanities
here. I would say this unto the present day, partly because it
rubs people who are in the humanities the wrong way. It is
nonetheless interesting that Stanford is a technical university.
It just doesn’t happen to have the letter T in its name. It is a
technical university, and like some technical universities all
over the world, not all of them, it has small but excellent
humanities. And I think that we would probably not be as good
as we are, and we would not have developed the collective
intellectual style that characterizes it, if we were not in this
environment. Not in the sense that we have to define ourselves
against the technical environment. Rather, to say it
metaphorically, I think that there are vibrations coming from
computer science, coming from our unbelievably strong
business school, or from our incredibly strong engineering
departments. I think that we have had—I am very happy that I
am a humanist at Stanford during the past 29 years—a much
more exciting trajectory. I had a much more exciting personal
trajectory than the one I would have had, had I been at a
classical humanities university, such as Yale, or Princeton, or
Chicago. It has been fantastic to be here. I feel that, in terms of
books or serial publications, the impact that Stanford Press
has made as compared to some other university presses, such
as Chicago, has not been terribly successful, huh? Perhaps
because these subjects were, or rather these institutions were
founded in a time when Stanford and humanities still sounded
like an oxymoron. I think this is changed now, and if one would
start a publication like the Grundriss now, it would probably be
different. I don’t know. You being a younger colleague, would
you found a journal today, or start a serial publication? I don’t
think it is the age for that.

So, the lack of success of the Grundriss, to return to your main

question, happened because of two reasons. First, there is the
environment, as I have given some examples. Second, it
probably came too late. On top of it, it was too encyclopedic.
When I say it came too late, I mean not so much in the sense
that one would not have been able to use the description of
medieval vernacular literature in Romance Languages that is
there in the Grundriss, a description that aimed at plenitude
and completeness. I think that the documentations and
references are still useful. Even the idea that drove the
project, to compile knowledge about every single manuscript
containing medieval vernacular texts, literary texts, in
romance languages, that they should be properly documented.
I think it came too late because of the production costs. By the
time we were half-way through with it, the costs—which were
not to be avoided—had reached a level that made it
impossible to carry on with the project, impossible even for
university libraries in Germany to buy it, to continue with their
subscription. The Winter Verlag, the university press that
funded it, still exists, but that publishing house, which did the
Grundriss, first with the two founders and then with me, went
bankrupt. I think that the Grundriss was one part of its
bankruptcy.

Moreover, if one imagines that the Grundriss had ever been

successfully completed—which will never happen, as the idea
was 25 volumes—the end of the project would have probably
overlapped with electronic age. That, of course, is something
that today one could restart. Today, it would be useful, and I
would say that one should only do the documentary part. The
Grundriss came too late in this very technical and economic
sense. Too expensive and not necessarily helpful for internet
age. So, I would that, excluding the documentations, the
project could be useful today because of possible ties to New
Philology, even more successful than what it could have
originally been.

It is the historical part—the production of historical

knowledge about the texts—that was certainly not thought
through, and certainly not seen as it would have been seen
from today’s point of view. The concept of literature in the title,
for example, is a completely naïve one. It was not carefully
elaborated, I mean in the sense of asking “what literature
would have been in the Middle Ages. Is there something that is
medieval vernacular literature that has anything to do with the
post-Romantic way that we are used to today? Also, why
romance? Or why only romance?” This division of literatures
was a division that had to do with a relatively random
institutional structure. Why did the project not include, for
example, medieval German literature? Why not including all
the vernacular literatures, which would then include Nordic
literatures, English, German literatures—there would be no
Slavic literatures because they start later.

Despite all of that, like the other publications I was

mentioning, I would say there are a couple of gems in the
existing volumes. I think my academic adviser’s essay on
medieval allegory is very, very important. This was the first
volume that came out, the historical volume number 6. I think
we made this insane effort of medieval history-writing.
Whether the project is historiographic in itself, that is a
different question. But then we wanted to do something on the
historical part that would be in line with discussions that were
going on in the realm of historiography in the 1980s. Well, we
produced 1200 pages. In a strange way, I am very proud of it.
However, there is too much material written in German. Which
is another condition of having come out too late. Back then, in
the 1950s and early 60s, German was still this
Wissenschaftsprache. Scholars then would know German,
which is no longer the case. I don’t think that there is anything
wrong with our situation nowadays. Also, there were too many
technical conditions that made this come out too late—price,
scope, and so forth. In that sense, the history of the Grundriss
is a tragic-comic one.

JOIN THE COLLOQUY

On Being a Medievalist and

More
Curator Marisa Galvez
Join the Colloquy

Interview with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

 by Marisa Galvez

The Production of Medieval Life Forms in

the Work of Gumbrecht
by Marisa Galvez

The Medieval Beginnings of Italian Poetry

Today
by Heather Webb

JOIN THE COLLOQUY

Colloquy

On Being a Medievalist and

More
Curator Marisa Galvez
This Colloquy originated in the "After 1967"
conference of 2018 in which we celebrated the
work of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. It is concerned
with Gumbrecht's relation to medieval literature,
his original field of interest.
more
 Join the Colloquy

Stanford Humanities Today

Discovering Humanities Research at Stanford

Visit today

Stanford Humanities Center

Advancing Research in the Humanities

Visit SHC

CESTA
Humanities Research for a Digital Future

Visit CESTA

Arcade: A Digital Salon

Colloquies Sign in

Interventions Create
Account
Publications
Contact
About

Subscribe to our newsletter: Humanities Update

Email Address *
Subscribe

Privacy Policy
Terms of Use
DMCA Contact
 Stanford strives to post only content for which we have
licensed permission or that is otherwise permitted by
copyright law. If you have a concern that your copyrighted
material is posted here without your permission, please
contact us and we will work with you to resolve your
concern.

© 2023 Arcade bloggers retain copyright of their own

posts, which are made available to the public under a
Creative Commons license, unless stated otherwise. If any
Arcade blogger elects a different license, the blogger's
license takes precedence.

Arcade: A Digital Salon by https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade

is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Based on a work at shc.stanford.edu/arcade.

Stanford Home Maps & Directions

Search Stanford Emergency Info

Terms of Use Privacy

Copyright Trademarks
Non-Discrimination Accessibility

©Copyright Stanford University. Stanford, California 94305