Classical Philology and Literary Criticism

Abstract

The classical philology is the oldest philological discipline. It has been always dealing with the texts written in classical languages. But its object has been various: through the text the classical philology studied a history, a culture, a philosophy, a language, and a literature. Although the classical philology is essentially a text-oriented discipline, the immanent approach to the literary text is not characteristic for it. The immanent approaches usually have been developed in the modern philologies – where the language is not to be overcome, realia are not to be commented, and the extratextual situation is not to be reconstructed. Therefore the methods of the modern literary criticism in general are rarely applied to the ancient literature the thing is that it is the classical philology that inevitably has monopoly on the professional studies in the field of the ancient literature that hardly can be studied on a professional level without a good command of the classical languages and without the scholar being included in the classical tradition. So it seems to be important to establish the cooperation between the classical philology and the literary criticism proper. It may open not only the ancient text for the modern approaches, but also the classical approaches for the modern texts.