O Futuro da Filologia
26 Outubro 2021, 17:00 • Rodrigo Furtado
1. Para que serve estudar Filologia/Estudos Literários?
1.1 ‘Philology is, or should be, the discipline of making sense of texts’ (Pollock 2009).
1.2 ‘Philology is a component of textual criticism and editing, the writing of commentaries, stylistic and metrical studies, as well as those modes of interpretation and literary history wherein the notions of “afection”, “respect”, or “close proximity” to the text are maintained. At the same time, it drwas from history, archaeology, palaeography, epigraphy, historical linguistics, anthropology, the study of religion, and critical theory, for all of those potentially aid in the quest for facts and truthsabout literary texts’ (Thomas, 1990).
1.3 ‘Philology is a budget-busting nightmare, a labor intensive, preindustrial, artisanal craft that stands in the starkest contrast to the Fordist method and mass-marketing of most of the human sciences’ (Pollock 2009).
1.4 ‘Philology never developed into a discrete conceptually coherent, and institutionally unified field of knowledge, but has remained a vague congeries of method’ (Pollock 2009).
1.5 ‘In a climate of resistance to canons and hierarchies, of postcolonialism (etc.) shifts of emphasis from centre to periphery, of postmodern suspicion of authorities and values, principled attachment to the classics (any classics) can only seem anomalous’ (Silk 2013).
1.6 Here we find ourselves in potential conflict with recent, chiefly deconstructionist, critical theory, whose goal is “to dominate rather than to interpret literature”. Or in the words of one more sympathetic to deconstruction: “the reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer.” But these are boundaries which for philology are uncrossable. The attempt to cross them is not a matter of devilishness and potency (as the deconstructive critic might see it, but a conceptual impossibility and a grotesquery’ (Thomas 1990).
1.7 ‘Deconstruction is something other than philology, in that it denies prima facie that there is any truth about language, that things can be "known" about literary texts, so in a sense deflects even the attempt that is at the heart of philology’ (Thomas 1990).
2. A proposta de Pollock:
2.1 Textual-meaning: ‘The lies and truths of texts must remain a prime object of any future philology’.
2.2 Contextual-meaning: ‘Philology is always necessar but never sufficient. One part of its insufficiency can only be satisfied attending to contextual meaning.
2.3 Philologist’s (social?) meaning: ‘Texts do not exist only to be understood historically; they exist to become valid for us—not in the sense of “authoritative,” but of “useful”—by being interpreted. Discovering the meaning of such texts by understanding and interpreting them and discovering how to apply them in a particular legal or spiritual instance, or even thinking about a work of art in relation to one’s own life, are not separate actions but a single process. And the principle here holds for all interpretation; applicatio is not optional but integral to understanding.
2.4 Said’s most important contribution may lie not so much in having taught us to read literature politically—after all, imperialism-and-literature was well-ploughed terrain long before he arrived on the scene— but, instead,to read politics philologically,by demonstrating how the text of a political problem has been historically transmitted, reconstructed, received, or falsified.
3. Problemas:
3.1 Filologia e interdisciplinaridade;
3.2 Saberes inúteis?
3.3 Onde está a ciência?
Leituras:
* Richard F. Thomas, ‘Past and future in Classical Philology’ (1990).
* Sheldon Pollock, ‘Future philology? The fate of a soft science in a hard world’ (2009).
* Michael Silk, ‘Literary theory and the classics’ (2013).