Where everything is text, because everything is code, there is no longer one finished work, but only semi-finished products—blanks. Images, films, sounds, words—in a digital world, everything is open to being processed and reprocessed, transcoded and converted. Hannes Bajohr’s Blanks: Word Processing collects poetry made by a whole range of digital operations and shows that, from the works of Kafka and management bibles to sex advice columns and climate reports, each text provides a space from which to go on, filling in a new version, translating it into one’s own language.
Philology, master science of the nineteenth century, has changed so radically over the course of the twentieth century that it is hardly recognizable in the twenty-first. Its scope has been transformed, its methodology contested, and its legitimacy called into doubt. Does it still make sense to speak institutionally and epistemologically of ‘philology’? Does this venerable title continue to signify a truly coherent field, and not a multitude of scattered currents and competing genealogies, differing national characteristics, and inconsistent methodologies? This volume collects answers by a range of young philologists, given at the 11th Annual Columbia University German Graduate Student Conference. They show that philology, in its practices and theories, continues to be the fundament of the ever-expanding field of literature and language studies – and that a discipline whose very core is the care for the text wields competencies that are indispensable for neighboring fields. In conversation with Brecht and George, Hamann and Rilke, Nietzsche and Heidegger, these essays confront questions of materiality, epistemology, and ontology that define, as Sheldon Pollock put it, the “fate of a soft science in a hard world.”
Where everything is text, because everything is code, there is no longer one finished work, but only semi-finished products—blanks. Images, films, sounds, words—in a digital world, everything is open to being processed and reprocessed, transcoded and converted. Hannes Bajohr’s Blanks: Word Processing collects poetry made by a whole range of digital operations and shows that, from the works of Kafka and management bibles to sex advice columns and climate reports, each text provides a space from which to go on, filling in a new version, translating it into one’s own language.
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