Philology: the forgotten origins of the modern humanities

Diacronia, 3, 2017, 1(5)., 2017

1990

As the Byzantinist Ihor Ševčenko 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.

Journal of the History of Ideas

in which I review three books: Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities by James Turner; World Philology edited by Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang; and Minima Philologica by Werner Hamacher

History of Humanities, 2016

Philological Encounters, 2016

Drawing on recent calls for a return to philology and on the experience of the international research programme "Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship", this essay seeks to problematise these calls by examining some of the potential and fruitful avenues of inquiry as well as some of the challenges that lie ahead for a future "World Philology".

Modes of Philology in Medieval South India, 2017

In southern India around 1100 ce, certain unknown authors, participating in conventions that were already many centuries old, began to produce Sanskrit texts claiming to be the teachings of various divinities and other supernatural beings. The legatees of existing textual corpora that had been composed outside the region, many of these new works were the outcome of textual practices that were fundamentally philological in nature. They synthesized extant textual materials, interpreted and adapted them in light of their authors' particular interests and projects, and offered rationalized schemes of textual organization that included themselves, their textual precursors, and the scriptures of other traditions. A great many of these texts, both those cast in the narrative form of the purāṇas and in the prescriptive mode of the tantras, were invested in an effort to organize knowledge as it pertained to the region's Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava temples, among the most significant social institutions of the far South, whose economic and political as well as religious significance surged in this period. This anonymous philology in turn provoked changes in the intellectual habits of authors who chose to disseminate works under their own names. In Śāradātanaya's long verse essay on Sanskrit dramatic theory, a first-order adaptation of the new philology is apparent: the meandering verse-style of the anonymous philologists supplied a model for his writing, while the habit of confected citation and of the integration of already existing text into a new context supplied crucial elements of the dramaturge's modus operandi. By the time of Veṅkaṭanātha and Maheśvarānanda, both writing around the turn of the fourteenth century, these new philologies had become long established parts of the textual universe of the far south, and their works thus provide an especially rich opportunity to assess the changes that this engendered. Veṅkaṭanātha defended the bibliographic scheme of the Pañcarātra scriptural canon, while fending off efforts of his fellow Vaiṣṇavas to practice an athetizing higher criticism on parts of this canon. His purpose was thus explicitly conservative; yet his defense of his religion's scriptures evinces a new precision of both textual method and manner of argument, evidently deriving from his study of the tantras themselves. Veṅkaṭanātha's novel relationship to his scriptural sources seems to have had wider repercussions in his oeuvre, complexly interacting with his own remarkable poetic writings. And if Veṅkaṭanātha worked to con-

Florilegium, 2015

[for special issue, "Rethinking Philology: Twenty-Five Years after The New Philology"] In North American academia, the word ‘philology’ pulls in two directions—toward a broad, idealist sense corresponding to the roots philia and logos and toward a narrower conception of ‘mere’ philology, a historicist subdiscipline centered on etymology and textual editing. This essay examines the role of ‘philology’ before, during, and beyond the period known as the ‘linguistic turn,’ with special focus on The New Philology. Against the many invocations of ‘philology’ pitting the lofty ideal against fallen disciplinary practice, I argue for the institutional reelaboration of philological study in the present.

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2015

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