Post-philology

Abstract

Philology has been more often irrelevant than controversial within mainstream critical debates.With the expansion of electric technologies and the fragmentation of the nationalist disciplines that first nurtured philology, its demise may seem more certain than ever. Indeed, Roberta Frank has pointed out that some dictionaries boldly declare that the word is no longer in use. Many, it would seem, have taken to heart René Wellek’s advice "to abandon" philology altogether. Frank, however, still wonders about the future and concludes with a question that has interested me since I first faced the prospect of teaching a graduate course in philology (traditionally a technical course for specialists in medieval studies) for students primarily interested in modern literatures: "Does Philology, backward looking to her core, have a future tense?"1 My experiences with "Introduction to Romance Philology" led me to formulate the question in terms specific to current critical debates: can philology reach the next "post" along with the "modern" and the "colonial"? How can a discipline devoted to meta-narratives about language cope with critiques of the unity of both language and subjectivity? And how can a discipline fostered in the midst of nineteenth-century European colonialisms engage critiques of that history and its legacies?