Philology

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

Book Description
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.

World Philology

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

Book Description
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.

Philology of the Flesh

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

Book Description
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.

The Powers of Philology

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

Book Description
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.

Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future

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

Book Description
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.

Digital Classical Philology

Author: Monica Berti
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110596997
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
Thanks to the digital revolution, even a traditional discipline like philology has been enjoying a renaissance within academia and beyond. Decades of work have been producing groundbreaking results, raising new research questions and creating innovative educational resources. This book describes the rapidly developing state of the art of digital philology with a focus on Ancient Greek and Latin, the classical languages of Western culture. Contributions cover a wide range of topics about the accessibility and analysis of Greek and Latin sources. The discussion is organized in five sections concerning open data of Greek and Latin texts; catalogs and citations of authors and works; data entry, collection and analysis for classical philology; critical editions and annotations of sources; and finally linguistic annotations and lexical databases. As a whole, the volume provides a comprehensive outline of an emergent research field for a new generation of scholars and students, explaining what is reachable and analyzable that was not before in terms of technology and accessibility.

Philology and Its Histories

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

Book Description
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.

Historical Philology

Author: Bela Brogyanyi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027277478
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
The present volume mainly contains contributions on the classical language, Greek and Latin. In addition to the historical comparative linguistic aspects of these languages, philological and historical questions are dealt with as well. Consideration of Italic and Romance topics is also included. The volume is divided into 7 sections: I. Greek linguistics, II. Greek lexicology, III. Mycenology. IV. Greek philology, V. Italic and Latin philology, VI. Latin and Romance languages, VII. Roman history.

Philology Matters!

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004349561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
This book is about philology and its relevance over time. The compilation foregrounds a multi-faceted field of research that has dealt with the relationship between language, literature and culture for over 2,000 years. The main thread of this volume, comprising ten scholarly essays, is to show that philology as an academic field and a scholarly perspective―understood in its widest sense as the profound understanding of language, literature and culture―does matter in the twenty-first century, that is to say, in our own time characterized by globalization and digitalization. The contributions reflect the many dimensions of philology and its plurality, interdisciplinarity and the humanities. The volume seeks to illustrate various ways of engaging with philology. Here lies the true nature of philology, and this is why it still matters. Contributors are Massimiliano Bampi, Maja Bäckvall, Jonas Carlquist, Odd Einar Haugen, Helge Jordheim, Karl G. Johansson, Lino Leonardi, Harry Lönnroth, Outi Merisalo, Marita Akhøj Nielsen and Nestori Siponkoski.

History of Classical Philology

Author: Diego Lanza
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110730383
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
An updated history of classical philology had long been a desideratum of scholars of the ancient world. The volume edited by Diego Lanza and Gherardo Ugolini is structured in three parts. In the first one (“Towards a science of antiquity”) the approach of Anglo-Saxon philology (R. Bentley) and the institutionalization of the discipline in the German academic world (C.G. Heyne and F.A. Wolf) are described. In the second part (“The illusion of the archetype. Classical Studies in the Germany of the 19th Century”) the theoretical contributions and main methodological disputes that followed are analysed (K. Lachmann, J.G. Hermann, A. Boeckh, F. Nietzsche and U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff). The last part (“The classical philology of the 20th century”) treats the redefinition of classical studies after the Great War in Germany (W. Jaeger) and in Italy (G. Pasquali). In this context, the contributions of papyrology and of the new images of antiquity that have emerged in the works of writers, narrators, and translators of our time have been considered. This part finishes with the presentation of some of the most influential scholars of the last decades (B. Snell, E.R. Dodds, J.-P. Vernant, B. Gentili, N. Loraux).