The Future of Philology

The Future of Philology PDF Author: Hannes Bajohr
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443861979
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Philology, master science of the nineteenth century, has changed so radically over the course of the twentieth century that it is hardly recognizable in the twenty-first. Its scope has been transformed, its methodology contested, and its legitimacy called into doubt. Does it still make sense to speak institutionally and epistemologically of ‘philology’? Does this venerable title continue to signify a truly coherent field, and not a multitude of scattered currents and competing genealogies, differing national characteristics, and inconsistent methodologies? This volume collects answers by a range of young philologists, given at the 11th Annual Columbia University German Graduate Student Conference. They show that philology, in its practices and theories, continues to be the fundament of the ever-expanding field of literature and language studies – and that a discipline whose very core is the care for the text wields competencies that are indispensable for neighboring fields. In conversation with Brecht and George, Hamann and Rilke, Nietzsche and Heidegger, these essays confront questions of materiality, epistemology, and ontology that define, as Sheldon Pollock put it, the “fate of a soft science in a hard world.”

The Future of Philology

The Future of Philology PDF Author: Hannes Bajohr
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443861979
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
Philology, master science of the nineteenth century, has changed so radically over the course of the twentieth century that it is hardly recognizable in the twenty-first. Its scope has been transformed, its methodology contested, and its legitimacy called into doubt. Does it still make sense to speak institutionally and epistemologically of ‘philology’? Does this venerable title continue to signify a truly coherent field, and not a multitude of scattered currents and competing genealogies, differing national characteristics, and inconsistent methodologies? This volume collects answers by a range of young philologists, given at the 11th Annual Columbia University German Graduate Student Conference. They show that philology, in its practices and theories, continues to be the fundament of the ever-expanding field of literature and language studies – and that a discipline whose very core is the care for the text wields competencies that are indispensable for neighboring fields. In conversation with Brecht and George, Hamann and Rilke, Nietzsche and Heidegger, these essays confront questions of materiality, epistemology, and ontology that define, as Sheldon Pollock put it, the “fate of a soft science in a hard world.”

Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future

Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future PDF Author: James I. Porter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804736671
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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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.

Philology

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

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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

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

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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.

The Powers of Philology

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

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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.

China's Philological Turn

China's Philological Turn PDF Author: Ori Sela
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545177
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In eighteenth-century China, a remarkable intellectual transformation took place, centered on the ascendance of philology. Its practitioners were preoccupied with the reliability of sources as evidence for restoring ancient texts and meanings and with the centrality of facts and truth to their scholarship and identity. With the power to construct the textual past, philology has the potential to shape both individual and collective identities, and its rise to prominence consequently deeply affected contemporaneous political, social, and cultural agendas. Ori Sela foregrounds the polymath Qian Daxin (1728–1804), one of the most distinguished scholars of the Qing dynasty, to tell this story. China’s Philological Turn traces scholars’ social networks and the production of knowledge, considering the texts they studied along with their reading practices and the assumptions about knowledge, facts, and truth that came with them. The book considers fundamental issues of eighteenth-century intellectual life: the tension between antiquity’s elevated status and the question of what antiquity actually was; the status of scientific knowledge, especially astronomy, mathematics, and calendrical studies; and the relationship between learned debates and cultural anxieties, especially scholars’ self-characterization and collective identity. Sela brings to light manuscripts, biographies, letters, handwritten notes, epitaphs, and more to highlight the creativity and openness of his subjects. A pioneering book in the cultural history of intellectuals across disciplinary boundaries, China’s Philological Turn reconstructs the history of eighteenth-century Chinese learning and its long-lasting consequences.

Friedrich Max Müller and the Role of Philology in Victorian Thought

Friedrich Max Müller and the Role of Philology in Victorian Thought PDF Author: John R. Davis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351800701
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The German comparative philologist Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) was one of the most influential scholars in Victorian Britain. Müller travelled to Britain in 1846 in order to prepare a translation of the Rig Veda. This research visit would turn into a lifelong stay after Müller was appointed as Taylor Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford in 1854. Müller’s activities in this position would exert a profound influence on British intellectual life during the second half of the nineteenth-century: his book-length essay on Comparative Mythology (1856) inspired evolutionist thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor and made philology into one of the master sciences at mid-century; his debates with Charles Darwin and his followers on the origin of language constituted a significant component of religiously informed reactions to Darwin’s ideas about human descent; his arguments concerning the interdependence of language and thought influenced fields such as psychology, neurology, paediatrics and education until the end of the nineteenth century; his theories concerning an ‘Aryan’ language that purportedly predated Sanskrit and ancient Greek led to controversial debates on the relations between language, religion and race in the Indian subcontinent and beyond; and his monumental 50-volume edition of the Sacred Books of the East helped to lay the foundations for the study of comparative religion. Müller’s interlocutors and readers included people as various as Alexander von Humboldt, Darwin, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ferdinand de Saussure, Ernst Cassirer, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jarwaharlal Nehru. This volume offers the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary assessment of Müller's career to date. Arising from a conference held at the German Historical Institute in London in 2015, it brings together papers by an international group of experts in German studies, German and British history, linguistics, philosophy, English literary studies, and religious studies in order to examine the many facets of Müller’s scholarship. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Publications of the English Goethe Society.

Pataphilology

Pataphilology PDF Author: Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447815
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
What do the bizzare etymologies of Jean-Pierre Brisset, made-up languages for literary fiction, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Latin grammarians, Horace's Epodes, and the Papyrus of Ani have in common? Nothing! Taken together they provide an unusually coherent picture of a hitherto unacknowledged non-tradition of linguistic investigation. If pataphysics is the science of the singular, the unparallelled, the exception that has no rule, pataphilology is what gets it there, the singularity of singularities. It is the mode in which exceptions become exceptional, itself an unrepeatable intervention in the language. - Back cover.

Geographies of Philological Knowledge

Geographies of Philological Knowledge PDF Author: Nadia Altschul
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226016218
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This work examines the relationship between medievalism and colonialism in the 19th-century Hispanic American context through the striking case of the Creole Andrés Bello (1781-1865), a Venezuelan grammarian and politician, and his lifelong philological work on the medieval heroic narrative 'The Poem of the Cid'.

Permanent Crisis

Permanent Crisis PDF Author: Paul Reitter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022673823X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Leads scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities into more effectively analyzing the fate of the humanities and digging into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world. The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, at the mercy of modernizing and technological forces that are driving universities towards academic pursuits that pull in grant money and direct students to lucrative careers. But as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon show, this crisis isn’t new—in fact, it’s as old as the humanities themselves. Today’s humanities scholars experience and react to basic pressures in ways that are strikingly similar to their nineteenth-century German counterparts. The humanities came into their own as scholars framed their work as a unique resource for resolving crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods. The self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of its project. Through this critical, historical perspective, Permanent Crisis can take scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities beyond the usual scolding, exhorting, and hand-wringing into clearer, more effective thinking about the fate of the humanities. Building on ideas from Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Small and Danielle Allen, Reitter and Wellmon dig into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world. ,