The Philological Laboratory set out to enable new modes of speaking and writing about literature, modes not confined by prevailing protocols of critique. How far did we get? There are many tangible results we can point to: colloquia, workshops and conferences, innumerable lectures and discussions, articles, books.
From the beginning, we, members of the research group, knew that to have a chance of succeeding, the Philological Laboratory would need to cast a wide net. Housed in the Friedrich Schlegel School of Literary Studies at Freie Universität, our first point of address was academic. Yet even here we took care to avoid a narrow focus: we engaged students as well as advanced scholars, and we sought out researchers working in contemporary literature as well as philologists of Greek and Latin antiquity. (Our first workshop was held together with a group of classicists.) Since our aim was to mix the poetic and the critical, we could not confine ourselves to academic discourse and scientific practices. We brought together scholars, critics, writers, and poets and urged them to speak to one another. We invited poets and writers to think critically, and critics and scholars to write poetically. We encouraged them to trespass into each other’s territory, to cross boundaries, to experiment with new modes of presentation.
To have maximum impact, we developed different formats in which to unfold this work. The conceptual foundations of critique and critical practices were investigated in semester-long colloquia that brought together doctoral students, post-docs, and senior scholars. We offered day-long workshops in which guest instructors challenged students to develop new forms of presenting academic research and scholarship. We invited poets and writers to reflect on their own critical practices in public presentations. We urged scholars to give shape to the concept of poetic critique in the framework of an international conferences, which led to a landmark volume. We recruited two dozen writers of widely different backgrounds and temperaments to uncover the hidden energy in common concept of literary criticism and to bundle their thoughts in short essays, which we collected in a book. Then there is our own work, our lectures, articles, and monographs.
There is much to be proud of in this work. Yet its true impact lies not in what we have done but in what our work allows others to do, in the paths of actions that it opens, in the ways of speaking and writing about literature (or about any significant object) it unleashes in others. We have done little more than plant seeds. It will take time to see what fruit they might bear.