PHILOLOGY IS THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE IN ORAL AND WRITTEN HISTORYCAL SOURCES

PHILOLOGY IS THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE IN ORAL AND WRITTEN HISTORYCAL SOURCES

Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection between literary criticism, history, and linguistics.^[1] Philology is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist.

Philology, with its focus on historical development (diachronic analysis), is contrasted with linguistics due to Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis. The contrast continued with the emergence of structuralism and Chomskyan linguistics alongside its emphasis on syntax.

Classical philology studies classical languages. Classical philology principally originated from the Library of Pergamum and the Library of Alexandria around the fourth century BCE, continued by Greeks and Romans throughout the Roman/Byzantine Empire.

What are the elements of language particularly poetry that change?

·         Words and their spelling and meaning; slang or common language alters more than formal languages. Words often have parts that are root words in other languages, or suffixes, or changes in spelling to fit easier translation into sound.

·         Formats, the style in which the poem is presented and why it is a good choice for the poem.

·         Blank space and its use

·         Rhyme, meter, and repetition and other style characteristics, and why it is a good choice for the poem.

·         Language source and where a word might have changed from one culture to another and why

Besides language, you need to look at historical aspects and what a poem of this sort might mean:

·         How the poet connects in a historical sense to other poets

·         What the effect of the message of the poem might be on audiences now compared to when it was written including the political, artistic, social, and personal ones, including yourself as reader

Like any other critical essay you start by analyzing the raw material at hand, in this case the poem and the poem’s author, and the poet’s biography. Specifically:

·         Look at words that have multiple meanings.

·         Look in the dictionary for the definitions and history of the word.

·         Look for what you feel the poem means.

·         Look for information that identifies the culture and times: food, places, styles, formalities, names, work, modes of transport; look at the history of the time and put them in context.

·          

This recent efflorescence of reflections on philology has had a second effect: like all emergent philologies, it has significantly reformulated the field and its history. The new perspective is global, cosmopolitan, and multilingual; within this context, Greek literature (and the specific variant of philology which underwrites it) is only one component of a much broader field and may even seem at a disadvantage, thanks to its long and sometimes unrepentant association with European centers of cultural imperialism. The result is bracing, but inevitable: no serious assessment of philology today can start with the classical. It must begin instead with the major and significant body of writing emerging largely from other fields. This corpus, which begins with the fundamental statement of Paul de Man (a statement commonly contested but still of undeniable significance),

After suggesting that philology today includes both textual scholarship and interpretation (this is slightly controversial), I turn to philology’s tendency to take place behind the scenes, then to its role as the site of literature; its inevitably self-critical procedures; its commitment to the concrete and to concrete models of analysis; and, finally, its use of figural rhetoric to generate strong meaning. One theme, perhaps, ties these elements together: a systematic but surprisingly productive refusal to overextend itself. Philology does not allegorize; it does not make grand claims; it does not contaminate its gaze with concerns drawn from the present—and yet this refusal produces literary texts as concrete objects and, through an almost infinite discretion, imbues them, paradoxically, with powerful contemporary significance (this last theme will only emerge in the final section of the essay). It seems to me that the merits of philology so defined are debatable; indeed, they may need to be debated more strenuously than hitherto. I would prefer not to initiate such a debate here. My goal is only to document and provide a serviceable synthesishas as its most high-profile representatives Edward Said, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Sheldon Pollock, Jerome McGann, Werner Hamacher, Emily Apter, and John Hamilton.

This provides a remarkably clear historical location for Pfeiffer’s own situation, and it further concretizes the impression that this history is a figural one. Writing in an age in which realist, historicist approaches to literature seemed to have begun to wither the work of restoring and explaining classical poetry on its own terms, Pfeiffer seemed to imagine his age as marked by the shipwreck of classical philology; a world in fragments, which, as it were, breathlessly awaited the next appearance of philologia perennis. Thus does Pfeiffer’s history of philology set up a triple set of figural correspondences, of which the third—like the soteriological event alluded to in Christian figural history—remains to come.

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Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection between literary criticism, history, and linguistics.^[1] Philology is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist.