What is the etymology of "Augenphilologie"?

Augenphilologie was used in the Scripps National Spelling Bee last night, and it seems like a fantastic word to use in writing. But I’m not sure how to use it in a sentence, or what its definition is really getting at. The definition given by Webster’s Third is:

linguistics that misrepresents the realities of speech because of overemphasis on writing.

Is it saying something like “writing tends to be much more florid than regular speech, thus misrepresenting it”? What are some other examples? Or does it mean something different?

Solution 1:

Here is an extract from The Writer in Petrograd and the House of Arts by Martha Weitzel Hickey. (A really interesting book!)

The interest of OPOIAZ members looking to define what was specific to poetic language as verbal material overlapped with those of the Institute of the Living Word. Boris Eikhenbaum's often-quoted introductory remarks to his seminal essay on narrative, "The Illusion of Skaz," were consonant with the view of literature and the word that the institute embraced.

We always speak of literature, of the book, of the writer. The culture of writing and the press have accustomed us to the letter ... We often forgot entirely that the word itself has nothing in common with the letter --- that it is a living, mobile activity, created by the voice, articulation, intonation, to which are joined gesture and mimesis. We think that the writer writes. But it is not always so, and in the realm of the artistic word it is more often just the opposite. The German philology of the "eye" (Augenphilologie) must be replaced by its oral counterpart (Ohrenphilologie).

There are, of course, special written forms, but literature (or rather more precisely, literariness) is not exhausted by them, and even in them one can find traces of the living word.

My understanding of the word Augenphilologie is that it is referring to the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development, and relationships of languages unconcerned of how the language "sounds" (the voice, pronunciation, articulation, intonation, etc), in another words, philology of the eyes.

To me this is an extremely uncommon word and I doubt anyone would actually use it in non-academic writing/conversation unless she or he is unconcerned of whether the readers/listeners would understand what it means.