Philology

2015-09-15
Philology

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  • Author: James Turner
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN: 069116858X
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 574

A prehistory of today's humanities, from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century Many today do not recognize the word, but "philology" was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all other studies of language and literature, as well as history, culture, art, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word? In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university. The humanities today face a crisis of relevance, if not of meaning and purpose. Understanding their common origins—and what they still share—has never been more urgent.

On Philology

1990
On Philology

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  • Author: Jan M. Ziolkowski
  • Publisher: Penn State Press
  • ISBN: 9780271007168
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 94

As the Byzantinist Ihor &Šev&_enko once observed, &"Philology is constituting and interpreting the texts that have come down to us. It is a narrow thing, but without it nothing else is possible.&" This definition accords with Saussure's succinct description of the mission of philology: &"especially to correct, interpret, and comment upon the texts.&" Philology is not just a grand etymological or lexicographical enterprise. It also involves restoring to works as much of their original life and nuances as we can manage. To read the written records of bygone civilizations correctly requires knowledge of cultural history in a broad sense: of folklore, legends, laws, and customs. Philology also encompasses the forms in which texts express their messages, and thus it includes stylistics, metrics, and similar studies. On Philology brings together the papers delivered at a 1988 conference at Harvard University's Center for Literary and Cultural Studies. The topic &"What is Philology?&" drew an interdisciplinary audience whose main fields of research ran the gamut from ancient Indo-European languages to African-American literature, signaling a certain sense of urgency about a seemingly narrow subject. These papers reveal that the role of philology is more important than ever. At a time when literature in printed form has taken a back seat to television, film, and music, it is crucial that scholars be able to articulate why students and colleagues should care about the books with which they work. Just as knowledge will be lost if philological standards decline, so too will fields of study die if their representatives cannot find meaning for today's readers. On Philology will be of interest not only to students of philology but also to anyone working in the fields of hermeneutics, literature, and communication.

On Philology

2010-11-01
On Philology

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  • Author: Jan Ziolkowski
  • Publisher: Penn State Press
  • ISBN: 0271044624
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 89

Philology of the Flesh

2018-08-03
Philology of the Flesh

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  • Author: John T. Hamilton
  • Publisher: University of Chicago Press
  • ISBN: 022657282X
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 248

As the Christian doctrine of Incarnation asserts, “the Word became Flesh.” Yet, while this metaphor is grounded in Christian tradition, its varied functions far exceed any purely theological import. It speaks to the nature of God just as much as to the nature of language. In Philology of the Flesh, John T. Hamilton explores writing and reading practices that engage this notion in a range of poetic enterprises and theoretical reflections. By pressing the notion of philology as “love” (philia) for the “word” (logos), Hamilton’s readings investigate the breadth, depth, and limits of verbal styles that are irreducible to mere information. While a philologist of the body might understand words as corporeal vessels of core meaning, the philologist of the flesh, by focusing on the carnal qualities of language, resists taking words as mere containers. By examining a series of intellectual episodes—from the fifteenth-century Humanism of Lorenzo Valla to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, from Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Hamann to Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan—Philology of the Flesh considers the far-reaching ramifications of the incarnational metaphor, insisting on the inseparability of form and content, an insistence that allows us to rethink our relation to the concrete languages in which we think and live.

World Philology

2015-01-05
World Philology

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  • Author: Sheldon Pollock
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press
  • ISBN: 0674052862
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 465

Philology—the discipline of making sense of texts—is enjoying a renaissance within academia after decades of neglect. World Philology charts the evolution of philology across the many cultures and historical time periods in which it has been practiced, and demonstrates how this branch of knowledge, like philosophy and mathematics, is an essential component of human understanding. Every civilization has developed ways of interpreting the texts that it produces, and differences of philological practice are as instructive as the similarities. We owe our idea of a textual edition for example, to the third-century BCE scholars of the Alexandrian Library. Rabbinical philology created an innovation in hermeneutics by shifting focus from how the Bible commands to what it commands. Philologists in Song China and Tokugawa Japan produced startling insights into the nature of linguistic signs. In the early modern period, new kinds of philology arose in Europe but also among Indian, Chinese, and Japanese commentators, Persian editors, and Ottoman educationalists who began to interpret texts in ways that had little historical precedent. They made judgments about the integrity and consistency of texts, decided how to create critical editions, and determined what it actually means to read. Covering a wide range of cultures—Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Indo-Persian, Japanese, Ottoman, and modern European—World Philology lays the groundwork for a new scholarly discipline.

Give the Word: Responses to Werner Hamacher's "95 Theses on Philology"

2019-06-01
Give the Word: Responses to Werner Hamacher's

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  • Author: Werner Hamacher
  • Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
  • ISBN: 1496206525
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 426

Werner Hamacher’s witty and elliptical 95 Theses on Philology challenges the humanities—and particularly academic philology—that assume language to be a given entity rather than an event. In Give the Word eleven scholars of literature and philosophy (Susan Bernstein, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Peter Fenves, Sean Gurd, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Jan Plug, Gerhard Richter, Avital Ronell, Thomas Schestag, Ann Smock, and Vincent van Gerven Oei) take up the challenge presented by Hamacher’s theses. At the close Hamacher responds to them in a spirited text that elaborates on the context of his 95 Theses and its rich theoretical and philosophical ramifications. The 95 Theses, included in this volume, makes this collection a rich resource for the study and practice of “radical philology.” Hamacher’s philology interrupts and transforms, parting with tradition precisely in order to remain faithful to its radical but increasingly occluded core. The contributors test Hamacher’s break with philology in a variety of ways, attempting a philological practice that does not take language as an object of knowledge, study, or even love. Thus, in responding to Hamacher’s Theses, the authors approach language that, because it can never be an object of any kind, awakens an unfamiliar desire. Taken together these essays problematize philological ontology in a movement toward radical reconceptualizations of labor, action, and historical time.

Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future

2000
Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future

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  • Author: James I. Porter
  • Publisher: Stanford University Press
  • ISBN: 9780804736985
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 476

Drawing on Nietzsche's prolific early notebooks and correspondence, this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher who abandoned classical philology. By showing how frequently the "later" Nietzsche appears in the early writings, the author hopes to provoke reflection on the adequacy of the developmental logic that has been a controlling factor in Nietzsche's reception.

The Powers of Philology

2003
The Powers of Philology

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  • Author: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
  • Publisher: University of Illinois Press
  • ISBN: 9780252028304
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 112

Philology--the discovery, editing, and presentation of historical texts--was once a firmly established discipline that formed the core study for students across a wide range of linguistic and literary fields. Although philology departments are steadily disappearing from contemporary educational establishments, in this book Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstrates that the problems, standards, and methods of philology remain as vital as ever. For two and a half millennia philologists have viewed themselves as the modest heirs and curators of their textual past's most glorious periods, collecting and editing text fragments, historicizing them and adding commentary, and ultimately teaching them to contemporary readers. Gumbrecht argues for a return to this tradition as an alternative to an often free-floating textual interpretation and to the more recent redefinition of literary studies as "cultural studies," which risks a loss of intellectual focus. Such a return to philological core exercises, however, can become more than yet another movement of academic nostalgia only if it takes into account the hidden desire that has inspired philology since its Hellenistic beginnings: the desire to make the past present again by embodying it.

The Systemic View as a Basis for Philological Thought

2021-11-11
The Systemic View as a Basis for Philological Thought

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  • Author: Olga Valentinova
  • Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
  • ISBN: 1793647720
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 409

In The Systemic View as a Basis for Philological Thought, Olga Valentinova, Vladimir Denisenko, Sergey Preobrazhenskii, andMikhail Rybakov explore the interrelation of language material, structure, and functions in various subjects of philological research, such as grammatical systems of language, semantics, linguistic personality, literary text, and formal aspects of verse. Their systemic approach is rooted in the theories of Wilhelm von Humboldt and his followers, including Russian scholars Alexander Potebnya, Gustav Shpet, and more recently Gennadii Prokop’evichMel’nikov (1928–2000). The authors use the concept of systematicity as an opportunity to see the studied whole in development, to show and explain the functional interaction of linear and supra-linear connections, to explain their interdependence, and to predict further changes within the system. This book displays the scientific potential of the systemic approach to linguistics and related spheres, employing the framework of systematicity to revise the modern trends of philology and to map out an alternative paradigm for linguistic and philological thought that could restore the status of philology as a holistic science.

Philology and Its Histories

2010
Philology and Its Histories

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  • Author: Sean Alexander Gurd
  • Publisher: Classical Memories/Modern Iden
  • ISBN: 9780814211304
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0

There has never been any shortage of interest in philology, its status, its history, or its origins. Today, after more than twenty years of serial "returns to philology" under the banner of deconstruction, the new medieval studies, critical bibliography, and a particular kind of globally aware activist criticism, philology has again become available as a respectable posture for contemporary literary scholars. But what is "philology," and how can we attend to it, either as a contemporary practice or as an age-old object of endorsement and critique? In this volume, edited by Sean Gurd, noted scholars discuss the history of philology from antiquity to the present. This book addresses a wide variety of authors, documents, and movements, among them Greek papyri, Latin textual traditions, the Renaissance, eighteenth-century antiquarianism, and deconstruction. It is too easy to see philology as the bearer of an antiquated but forceful authority. When philologists take up the tools of textual criticism, they contribute to the very form of texts; seeking to articulate the protocols of correct interpretation, they aspire to be the legislators of reading practice. Nonetheless, Philology and Its Histories argues that philology is not a conservative or ideologically loaded master-discourse, but a tradition of searching, fundamentally ungrounded, dealing with the insecurity of questions rather than the safety of answers. For good or ill, philology is where literature happens; we do well to pay heed to it and to its changes over the course of millennia.