How should the field of philology react to the ongoing quantitative growth of its material basis? This essay will first discuss two opposing strategies: The quantitative analysis of large amounts of data, promoted above all by Franco Moretti, is contrasted with the canon-oriented method of resorting to small corpora. Yet both the culturally conservative anxiety over growing masses of texts as well as the enthusiasm for the ‘digital humanities’ and the technological indexation of large text corpora prove to be unmerited when considering the complexity of the problem. Therefore, this essay advocates for a third, heuristic approach, which 1) accounts for the changes in global text production and storage, 2) is conscious of the material-political conditions that determine the accessibility of texts, and 3) creates a bridge between close and distant reading by binding quantitative approaches to fundamental, qualitative philological principles, thus helping philologists keep track of the irritating, provocative, and subversive elements of texts that automated queries inevitably miss.

Abstract:This article outlines four ways of writing the history of German Studies after 1945: 1. the history of theory and methods, 2. the history of projects and objects, 3. the history of institutions, 4. the biographical approach. The discipline is learning how to appreciate polycentric structures and philological traditions which transcend the boundaries of the 19th century and the nation state.

Scholars have long considered Heinrich Wolfflin a pioneer in 'Baroque studies'. Surprisingly little attention has been paid, however, to typological patterns and their importance for revising a classic-biased historiography. Reassessing the 'invention' of 'Baroque' literature and civilization in German literary criticism before, during and immediately after the First World War involves 1) outlining the interdisiplinary conditions and impulses that mark the beginning of 'Baroque studies' (before 1900), 2) examining closely the structure of typological approaches (1900-1933), and 3) discussing the problems of 'Baroque form' and 'style', as well as their anthropological derivatives Early-twentieth-century critics furthered the invention of a 'Baroque man' to describe and to legitimize themselves.