The Four Nodes of Convergence in Philological Knowledge

Abstract

Various narratives of the emergence, development, and contemporary condition of English Studies have consistently charted a path away from philology, arguing that philological rationales and worldviews were superseded and gradually forgotten as this area of scholarship and pedagogy, with proliferating divisions and context-specific diversities, came into its own. So, histories of English as an academic discipline, ensconced in institutions of higher education and research in dominant Anglophone centers and in relatively peripheral areas, have traced such a path repeatedly (some are reviewed in Part 2 of this study). With a somewhat different emphasis, accounts of the bifurcation of linguistics and literary study as two more or less parallel and ever more emphatically separate directions of English Studies track a similar departure from philology (retraced in Part 3). At the least as a descriptive strategy, the passages of English Studies are now widely understood both as being rooted in and as having departed from philological scholarship.