On Philology

Comparative Literature Studies Volume 27, no. 1 , 1990

"This special issue of Comparative Literature Studies brings together talks, some extensively revised, others virtually unchanged, that were delivered at a conference entitled "What is Philology?" The gathering took place on Saturday, March 19, 1988 at Harvard University under the aegis of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies. The depth and breadth of interest in the conference was deeply gratifying. I had not experienced another occasion when so many scholars from different language and literature departments gathered at Harvard, and I hope that publishing the proceedings will benefit a larger community outside the University. By way of introduction I will describe how the event originated. My description will explore a few of the reasons why an interdisciplinary conference of a dozen speakers and respondents attracted an audience of more than two hundred, and why a topic that 'may sound rarefied drew participants whose main fields of research and teaching interests ran the gamut from the most ancient Indo-European languages to the most recent African American literature. In short, I will offer tentative explanations for the urgency of the topic to students, professors, and independent scholars who engage in philology, linguistics, literary history, literary criticism, and literary theory."

The Future of Philology: Proceedings of the 11th Annual Columbia University German Graduate Student Conference. Edited by Hannes Bajohr, Benjamin Dorvel, Vincent Hessling, and Tabea Weitz, 2014

The conference whose proceedings are collected in this volume initiated by a rather simple observation and a rather simple question. The observation was that probably no other discipline in the vast spectrum of academic fields has undergone as sweeping a transformation as philology has during its history. Since the days of Karl Lachmann, it seems that nearly every aspect of it has changed radically, be it the subject, scope, or methodology. The question, then, is whether it still makes sense to speak institutionally and epistemologically of 'philology.' Does this venerable title still signify a truly coherent field, and not rather a multitude of scattered currents and competing genealogies, differing national characteristics and inconsistent methodologies? And if we ask what philology is and what it can be, must we not also ask ourselves what it is that we do? And how, more importantly, we can continue to do it? 1 In posing these questions, we follow a number of assumptions. We use the term 'philology'-not literary studies, criticism, or Germanistikbecause, historically, 'philology' is the root from which all these other disciplines stem. 'Philology' might then well mean something that, in one way or another, exceeds these disciplines. This intentional vagueness is what could be called the broad sense of the term 'philology'-an umbrella term that both betrays a certain distance and acts as a generic surface onto which one can project utopian ideals. Yet at the same time, philology can also mean, in the narrow or emphatic sense, something more specific, something that embodies what we call the 'core competencies' of literary studies. Traditionally, these 'core competencies' entail the constitution of texts and textual criticism; stemmatics and the edition of manuscripts; the delineation of the transcript history of 1 While we do not share all of Sheldon Pollock's assumptions or conclusions, we must acknowledge that from the very start our questions were stimulated by his sweeping argument for the legitimacy of philology: Sheldon Pollock, "Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World," Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 931-961.

Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2015

P Ph hi il lo ol lo og gy y A Am mo on ng g t th he e D Di is sc ci ip pl li in ne es s ( (I I) ): :

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

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

Intellectual History Review, 2015

Philology and its Histories, ed. Sean Gurd. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2010. 148-63

2015

This essay examines the 1960s/1970s’ transformation of the text as an object of reading, and argues for an equivalent transformation of philology as a practice of reading. I focus on the oscillation between reading as literacy (the capacity to recognize and decipher a given language) and reading as interpretation (the capacity to respond to the text). This oscillation itself results from an irreducible ambiguity in the text: both a stable verbal artifact with a determinable form and a bearer of indeterminate meaning. Reading Roland Barthes’s critique of philology and Ursula Le Guin’s science-fictional paean to its possibilities (‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’), I argue for a philological practice that resists, questions, and repositions the closure of the text.

The Future of Philology. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Columbia University German Graduate Student Conference, 2014

With reference to the increasing self-reflection of the way we read now, this paper opts for three different—yet associated—modes of a textual reading from whose point of view philological questions could be posed: interpretation, experience, and knowledge. Modeled as the geometric figure of a triangle, the phenomenon of literature may be seen to consist of three angles that constitute its concrete design: the textual composition of a fixed matrix of words, a performative adjustment to the recipient, and the constitution of historical contexts. From such a phenomenological perspective, the difference between depth and surface of a literary work of art seems to be in fact a superficial one because any textual significance is only manifest through its appearance. Depth, which is what remains unseen at a first glance, is explored by looking at the object more closely. It could also be described as yet another part of the same object’s surface. Beyond that, any philological reading is guided by scientific discourses. It may be defined, therefore, as a reproduction that opens the fundamental aspects of literature in various ways by investigating its basic and complex structure. The following paper will focus on three recent approaches to philology: the hermeneutic theory of Günther Figal in his book "Gegenständlichkeit," Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s exploration of the "Powers of Philology," and the lecture about the "Promises of Philology" held by Peter-André Alt. The practices of philology may be critically examined through such a description of philological interpretation, experience, and knowledge.