Lecture
In the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, processes of the specialization of knowledge developed actively in philology. Different subject
areas that had formed part of the complex body of philological
knowledge turned into the basis for separate sciences (scholarly disciplines). Thus a differentiation of the philological sciences (scholarly disciplines) takes place within philology.
Within the framework of the «new philology», national philologies
take shape: Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Turkic, Iranian, Altaic, and others; adjoining them is Oriental philology,
which has become a science. Classical philology also continues to exist. Such is one direction of differentiation.
The second direction leads to the division of philology as a
complex body of knowledge into the following philological sciences:
linguistics, literary studies, folkloristics. The formation of these sciences was caused by the fact that ideas
and principles oriented toward the investigation of language, imaginative literature, or folklore took shape within philology. (Incidentally, folkloristics is often regarded as a constituent part of literary studies.) The formation of each of these sciences proceeds along its own path.
The birth of linguistics as a science is connected with the beginning, in the first half of the nineteenth century, of the comparative-historical study of
language (R. Rask, F. Bopp, J. Grimm, A.Kh. Vostokov). It put forward the task of reconstructing the picture of the historical past
of languages on the basis of identifying so-called related languages, disclosing the laws governing the development of languages. This direction of research is not connected with satisfying practical
needs. It left aside many kinds of traditional philological work with a text (criticism, interpretation of meaning, etc.). Thereby linguistics becomes separated from the other philological sciences. The processes of separation intensify
toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century, when interest in studying the
structure of language prevails (F. de Saussure and others; structuralism). This is connected above all with the influence of semiotics and the natural sciences.
However, in linguistics the idea of language as the «spirit of a people» (W. von Humboldt) is preserved and developed. In many respects it is precisely this that
allows the science of language to «remain» within philology.
The basis of scholarly literary studies was the investigation of imaginative literature on the basis of biographical data
about authors (1830s; C.A. Sainte-Beuve and others) and in comparative-historical respects (1840s and subsequent years; H.M. Posnett, A.I. Kirpichnikov, and others).
Folkloristics as a science began in the works of the German
scholar Johann Herder (1744—1803), who held that
art expresses the «spirit of a people», its views, feelings,
and character; that art is connected with folk creativity. An important
role in the formation of folkloristics was played by the mythological
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philology... the cognition of what has been cognized». This thesis is explained by the author: «to cognize... what has been cognized — means to understand; understanding
is the general function of philology». Gottfried Hermann (1772—1848)
insisted that philology is the criticism and interpretation of
a text.
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768—1834) is recognized as the creator of modern hermeneutics as a science of understanding. Unlike exegetics, which interprets only sacred texts,
hermeneutics, according to Schleiermacher, studies the understanding of any
text. His main thesis: «To understand speech first just as well, and then even better, than its author». Hermeneutics is closely connected
with rhetoric.
The «new philology» acquires the meaning of its own existence:
at the center of philology stands the problem of understanding; the solution of this
problem is served by scholarly methods that can be applied in studying any people (hermeneutics, criticism, and others). At the same time, an understanding of philology is preserved also as a
historical-philological body of knowledge about ancient peoples (classical philology in one of its versions). During the course of
the nineteenth century a separation of philology and history would occur.
Thus began the transformation of philology as a complex
body of knowledge into philology as a complex of sciences and scholarly disciplines.
2.3. The specialization of philological knowledge
and the differentiation of the philological sciences:
the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century
In the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, processes of the specialization of knowledge developed actively in philology. Different subject
areas that had formed part of the complex body of philological
knowledge turned into the basis for separate sciences (scholarly disciplines). Thus a differentiation of the philological sciences (scholarly disciplines) takes place within philology.
Within the framework of the «new philology», national philologies
take shape: Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Turkic, Iranian, Altaic, and others; adjoining them is Oriental philology,
which has become a science. Classical philology also continues to exist. Such is one direction of differentiation.
The second direction leads to the division of philology as a
complex body of knowledge into the following philological sciences:
linguistics, literary studies, folkloristics. The formation of these sciences was caused by the fact that ideas
and principles oriented toward the investigation of language, imaginative literature, or folklore took shape within philology. (Incidentally, folkloristics is often regarded as a constituent part of literary studies.) The formation of each of these sciences proceeds along its own path.
The birth of linguistics as a science is connected with the beginning, in the first half of the nineteenth century, of the comparative-historical study of
language (R. Rask, F. Bopp, J. Grimm, A.Kh. Vostokov). It put forward the task of reconstructing the picture of the historical past
of languages on the basis of identifying so-called related languages, disclosing the laws governing the development of languages. This direction of research is not connected with satisfying practical
needs. It left aside many kinds of traditional philological work with a text (criticism, interpretation of meaning, etc.). Thereby linguistics becomes separated from the other philological sciences. The processes of separation intensify
toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century, when interest in studying the
structure of language prevails (F. de Saussure and others; structuralism). This is connected above all with the influence of semiotics and the natural sciences.
However, in linguistics the idea of language as the «spirit of a people» (W. von Humboldt) is preserved and developed. In many respects it is precisely this that
allows the science of language to «remain» within philology.
The basis of scholarly literary studies was the investigation of imaginative literature on the basis of biographical data
about authors (1830s; C.A. Sainte-Beuve and others) and in comparative-historical respects (1840s and subsequent years; H.M. Posnett, A.I. Kirpichnikov, and others).
Folkloristics as a science began in the works of the German
scholar Johann Herder (1744—1803), who held that
art expresses the «spirit of a people», its views, feelings,
and character; that art is connected with folk creativity. An important
role in the formation of folkloristics was played by the mythological
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(Ancient Greek mythos — word; tale, legend) school in scholarship
(the brothers W. and J. Grimm and others), which formulated the foundations
of comparative mythology. Folkloristics, at its emergence, distanced itself from the other philological sciences, in particular from linguistics.
The next direction of the specialization of scholarly knowledge in
the period under consideration is the internal differentiation of sciences.
First, the philological disciplines that had arisen earlier are preserved and developed. These are — textual criticism, source studies, bibliography, paleography, archaeography, and others.
Second, new scholarly disciplines arise. These are, for example, branches of linguistics: general linguistics, descriptive
linguistics, historical linguistics; branches of literary studies: the history of literature, the theory of literature, literary
criticism, and others.
One of the causes of the differentiation of the sciences is the formation and development of scholarly schools in philology, i.e. such associations of researchers as share common views on the object under study. These include both the national schools that took shape at the end of the
nineteenth — beginning of the twentieth century: German, Anglo-Saxon, French
and Belgian, North American, Russian; and schools uniting around the ideas of one or a group of major scholars, for example: the Saussurean school (F. de Saussure, C. Bally, A. Sechehaye, and others),
the Vinogradov school (V.V. Vinogradov, S.I. Ozhegov, N.S. Pospelov, and
others) in linguistics, the psychological school (W. Wundt, D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, and others), the formalist school (Yu.N. Tynyanov, V.B. Shklovsky, B.M. Eichenbaum, and others) in literary studies, the historical-geographic school (J. and K. Krohn), the historical school (V.F. Miller)
in folkloristics, and others.
In the philology of the first half of the twentieth century, ideas
are voiced in favor of integration as the basis for research.
Thus, L.V. Shcherba (1880—1944) saw the task of philology in interpreting the meaning of a literary text relying on both its
linguistic and its artistic structure (we are speaking of the literary text). By this method of interpretation the philologist differs from the linguist and the literary scholar: the linguist studies the linguistic structure of the text, and the literary scholar — its artistic structure. (See
in the reading materials given below, excerpts from an article by
L.V. Shcherba devoted to an analysis of M.Yu. Lermontov's poem «The Pine Tree» in comparison with its German original.)
According to M.M. Bakhtin (1895—1975), the fundamental basis
of philology is the idea of dialogism. A word stands in relations of dialogue with other words. This means that it is not only
directed toward the object, process, etc. that it denotes, but
also «converses» with, «echoes», other words of the given and other texts. The same applies to the utterance and to the text.
«To live means to participate in dialogue», wrote M.M. Bakhtin
(see, in the reading materials given below, excerpts from M.M. Bakhtin's book on F. Dostoevsky).
Thus, in the philological sciences of the first half of the twentieth century, the ideas of the philology of the past are developed, thereby strengthening the interdisciplinary (= general-philological) core of the philological sciences. Philology can become a method of integrative
study of language, text, and, finally, of the human being as author, reader,
character, and so on. All the more so since this task, posed in the works of the great philologists of the twentieth century, corresponds to the research
traditions of philology.
Thus, the natural process of the specialization of scholarly knowledge leads to the situation in which philology, as a unified, complex, practically oriented science, ceases to exist. In its place a number of sciences and scholarly disciplines grow up.
However, philology is preserved as a unified branch of scholarship.
Notable in this period was the self-cognition of philology.
The very fact of the existence of philology as an independent field of knowledge is debated. The Russian literary scholar
V.N. Peretz (1870—1935) sees the boundary between history and
philology as follows: history is a manifestation of thought in
action in the external world, while philology is a manifestation of
human creativity in the word as such. The Austrian
linguist H. Schuchardt (1842—1927) calls for abandoning even
the term «philology» itself, whose meaning he considers
indeterminate and unstable.
The answer to the main question of philology — what does it study? — is formulated in various ways. In the first half of the twentieth century two
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fundamentally different positions arose. The author of one of them is
F.F. Zelinsky (1859—1944), who acknowledges the existence of a
unified historical-philological science: this is «a science whose
content is the study of the creations of the human spirit in their
succession, i.e. in their development». Within this science, philology
is directed toward the study of written monuments,
while history is directed toward the study of the general laws of development. The authorship of
the other position belongs to G.O. Vinokur (1896—1947): the science
of literature and linguistics are «sisters, the products of an identically oriented consciousness that sets itself the task of
interpreting the text».
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