NEW JOURNAL:
PHILOLOGY: An International Journal on the Evolution of Languages, Cultures and Texts.
Philology
Francesco Benozzo
Università di Bologna
Dipartimento di Lingue e Culture Moderne
Via Cartoleria 5
I-40124 Bologna, Italy
e-mail: francesco.benozzo@unibo.it
Introduction
Philology is an international peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of human traditions as they emerge from oral, written, carved, painted, digital, performed, ancient, contemporary texts. The journal aspires to challenge and reformulate the expression of philological studies in the present day. We propose that the contemporary world be understood in its multicultural complexity, and thus that philology be re-founded as a relevant social science. To this end, we encourage constant dialogue with the methodologies of other disciplines, including linguistics, cultural anthropology, archaeology, paleoethnology, genetics and cultural biology. Philology promotes all efforts to go beyond the traditional boundaries of our habitual fields of enquiry, with the purpose of accomplishing anti-dogmatic and unprejudiced tools for facing the challenges of contemporaneity. The journal is open to a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches, from the study of linguistic evolution to literary interpretation, from textual criticism to the investigation of texts and ethnotexts, from etymological reconstructions to the cognitive analyses of archaeological facies. Philological problems exist in the grammar of signs inscribed on a prehistoric stone or a shamanic drum no less than they do in the transmission of a text from one old manuscript to another.
Volume 1 was published in 2015. Biblical philology is represented therein. And there is
more on the journal at the Peter Lang website. Excerpt:
Philology was born as a subversive discipline, one that asserts our right to read and study holy texts, despite the obscurantism of their guardians. However, the field has gradually transformed its inclination towards freedom into inflexible methods and regimes of «truth». As scholars open to questioning our own complex, ever-changing roles in the contemporary world, we must doggedly refuse to be co-opted by mainstream studies and must assert our right to be irreverent, which lies at the very root of the notion of science. In the light of the foregoing, Philology sees research first and foremost as a form of rebellion and as a defense of dissent.
I like it.