Philology workshop with Omar Abdel-Ghaffar

“To young people of the current generation the very idea of philology suggests something impossibly antiquarian and musty, but philology in fact is the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts.” — Edward Said

Philology is the love of words. The practice of philology has historically been one of discovering meanings and tracing “proper” usages. This rather investigative practice has inspired a movement of new philologists, who criticize classical philology and seek to bring philology back to its origins, as a means of connecting and holding space for the distant other. New philological practices center hospitality rather than investigation, and seek to create a foundation of empathy that allows for embracing deviance and cherishing the conditions that bring it about.

This one-and-a-half-hour workshop with Omar Abdel-Ghaffar is aimed at guiding people interested in reading towards the basic practices of an open philology. It involves an overview of what philology is, and how it intersects with other types of art, particularly poetry and the novel. Participants will work with a text by Raed Yassin and learn the ways in which translations can reveal uncontrolled aspects of the text.