The times of Philology: an american History

Abstract

We propose here a double access to the question about the future of philology: on the one hand, a state of the art regarding the inquiry on philology as a discipline and a practice in the current debates of the theory, and some initial sketches on the possibilities opened by a crisis so many times seen as terminal. On the other hand, some working hypotheses are offered for the history of philology in Latin America in the 19th century, attempting to make visible its problematic and precarious location between language, literature and politics. As it is tried and deduced, the future of philology is only possible on the basis of a destruction of that form of time that defined its objects and procedures in its very heyday, and a necessary dissolution of the boundaries between subject and object, theory and corpus, which allows the practices associated with that name to face the demands of new contexts and material conditions of production, transmission and management of culture and its policies – that is, once again, learning to read.