Monday, July 26, 2021
Philology
Edward W. Said (1935-2003), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 57:
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Philology is just about the least with-it, least sexy, and most unmodern of any of the branches of learning associated with humanism...Id., p. 61:
For a reader of texts to move immediately, however, from a quick, superficial reading into general or even concrete statements about vast structures of power or into vaguely therapeutic structures of salutary redemption (for those who believe that literature makes you a better person) is to abandon the abiding basis for all humanistic practice. That basis is at bottom what I have been calling philological, that is, a detailed, patient scrutiny of and a lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetorics by which language is used by human beings who exist in history...
