The Return to Philology

What is the relationship between philology and aesthetic education, the process of learning how to judge and how tomake pleasing objects? If the question strikes us as a nonstarter, it may be because recent considerations of philology as a “failed discipline,” as John Guillory characterizes it, have aligned the manual and intellectual work of philologists with historicist and hermeneutic approaches to criticism (Professing Criticism 168). This view conspicuously underwrites Frances Ferguson’s description of philology, in which philology’s task is to authenticate fragmentary or distressed texts by detailing the chronology of their creation. Philology, Ferguson explains,