Philology: on reading slowly in a digital world

Abstract

This is a paper about a possible philology. To help envisage it, I draw on three recent books which between them speak of two kinds of readerly love: love of the word, and love of literature; I examine the interplay between these two ways of loving written texts, together with the effects of subjectivity and coercion that they generate and the future they imagine for the love of the word.