20 Oct Culture, Politics and Comparative Philology in the Nineteenth Century: A French Riposte
Christopher Prendergast (Modern and Midieval Languages,University of Cambridge)
October 20, 2016/5:30 PM
Mosher Alumni House, Board Room
The harnessing of the developing discipline of comparative philology to various agendas centred on ethnicity, nation and race is well-known as one of the key junction points at which nineteenth-century intellectual and academic history connected with political ideology. Christopher Pendergast returns to that scene, but in order to bring into the foreground a generally neglected point of resistance to that yoking of study of language to politics. He does so principally by way of the key figure of Michel Bréal, the first Professor of Comparative Grammar at the Collège de France.
Christopher Prendergast is Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College. He was formerly Distinguished Professor in French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York. He is a member of the British Academy, the Academia Europa and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also Honorary Professor at the University of Copenhagen.
Sponsored by the Graduate Center for Literary Research.