Perennial Philology and the Ideal of the White Overall

Abstract

Joining the university context in the middle of the 19th century, Philology served as a comprehensive basis for what nowadays is meant by literary and linguistic studies. Depending on the specialization tendency that would settle down in the academic context (with regard to either the formative offer or the foundation of various research fields), each of these areas followed separate or even divergent paths, losing, to a great extent, the contact with its initial basis. Despite this state of affairs, Philology has displayed a strong capacity of resistance, maintaining its traditional dimension active or going through metamorphoses that resulted from the incorporation of new technologies, as well as from the epistemological adjustment that enabled it to overcome its first positivist stages. Trying to find a new place inside the general framework of Social Sciences and Humanities, literary studies need to recover its order and credibility, two factors that the new face of Philology can inspire. The present study aims at reconstructing the most recent trajectory undergone by this field of research and education, by identifying a space of reconnection that already seems to be adequate and beneficial.