“CAPITAL” AND “PROVINCE”: PHILOLOGY IN THE SYSTEM OF INTERNATIONAL INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGE

The paper, written on the basis of a report read at Tyumen University, is devoted to the prospects of international exchange in philology in the context of widely spread institutional and disciplinary preconceptions about “metropolitan” and “provincial” science. The focus is on the specifics of the subject and prevailing practices in both cases (the study of concepts / the study of contacts); the specifics of the treatment of the national literary canon; the choice of methodological approach and research contexts, etc. The main vectors of philological exchanges that overcome the “peripheral” limitations of local philological research, mostly seen in its subordinate informative function for world science, are comprehended. Among them, the methodological reflection, independent of specific national and cultural material, stands out. The assumption is made that general ideas and theoretical questions asked to the subject are best derived from a separate tradition into international circulation and have the greatest chance of being picked up by researches from other countries to enter into a dialogue with their own concepts. Such questions are asked to masterpieces of national classics, “big data” studied by specialists in “world literature”, and to great theorists of the past, whose legacy reconfigured the history of ideas. It is also indicated that the export of ideas is especially effective in the situation of revision of disciplinary divisions, the collapse of old and the formation of new research paradigms. Philology in this perspective acts as an epistemological reference point, helping to clarify the relationship between a culturally limited “science for oneself” and a cosmopolitan “science for everyone”.