This is a blog about language and literature. I’ve always been fascinated by words, by how words form sentences, and how sentences form poems and stories. The technical term for this fascination is philology—the love of language. Friedrich Nietzsche defined philology as the art of reading slowly—that’s where I got the title for this blog. In the section titled What is Philology? I discuss what I take to be the four major components of philology: historical linguistics, the editing of texts, the interpretation of language in context, and the interpretation of literature with special attention to language. I’m interested in all of these, and I will post blogs on all of them, but my own work lies primarily in the third and fourth areas.
I created this site as an invitation for anyone who has a passion for literature—readers and writers of all sorts. I would like to think of this blog as one part of a conversation among people who share an interest in the way language works and the way it turns into art. Please feel free to enter the conversation by dropping me a note with your reactions to my posts or with your own thoughts. I welcome your comments and suggestions.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Karen L. Hogan, who did all the hard work of designing and mounting this blog. Without her help it wouldn’t have happened.
My Most Recent Blog Posts
A Note on Editing
One of the essential branches of philology is the editing of texts. I don’t write about this topic much, partly because it can get somewhat technical, and partly because I’m not a textual critic myself. But every philologist, especially those who work on ancient texts, has to know something about the editing of texts. We…
You Can Say That Again!
Part I: I just happened to reread Michael Ende’s fantasy tale, The Neverending Story (Die Unendliche Geschichte). I own a lovely hardcover of the German text, with illustrations by Roswitha Quadflieg. I also own an English paperback, well translated by Ralph Manheim. The hero is a young boy named Bastian Balthazar Bux, “a fat little…
Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic in “White Noise”
In the past few years I’ve been exploring a three-part framework for analyzing narratives. This framework asks three questions about a story: How is it composed? What does it represent? And what does it mean? To designate these three perspectives I have borrowed terms from James Phelan: the Synthetic Aspect, the Mimetic Aspect, and the…
Versions of Reality
My recent posts have been a sort of rough draft of my project on narrative world building. The basis of this project is a three-part framework I’ve derived from ideas first developed by James Phelan. Phelan doesn’t agree with the way I use his ideas—if you’re interested, see our collaborative book “Debating Rhetorical Narratology” (Ohio…
Four Features Beginnings
A while ago I wrote a post (“It’s Time to Wake Up!”) about what I called Alarm Clock Beginnings, when a novel starts first thing in the morning. In this post I look at another way to begin a novel, when a novel begins by specifying, in the first sentence or so, Time, Place, one…
One Last Kick at the Can: Three More Rings
There’s lots more to say about ring composition; I may return to the topic if I come across a ring that deserves comment, but this post will be the last in this series of posts. I. A story may be constructed so that the first link in the temporal sequence matches the last link. Thus…
The Art of Reading Slowly 