There are many ways to read. We can be mostly interested in the characters in a story, or we can look for symbols and themes. We can ask how a story represents reality—or we can ask if it does. We can interrogate the underlying class structures or the gender relationships. Philology is open to all of these ways of reading, but it has a particular interest in the words that constitute the work itself. Without these words none of the rest would be possible, so it makes sense to start with the words and how they are put together. This is my own particular philological interest, so expect a lot of posts about the language of literature.
The Art of Reading Slowly 