The Future of Philology

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, then, still make sense [...]
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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, then, still make sense to speak institutionally and epistemologically of 'philology'? Does this venerable title continue to signify a truly coherent field, and not, rather, 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 its theories, not only continues to be the fundament of the ever-expanding field of literature and language studies; they also demonstrate 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."