Research Catalog

Title

World philology / edited by Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang.

Publication

Cambridge, Massachusetts : London, England : Harvard University Press, 2015.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

• Pollock, Sheldon I.
• Elman, Benjamin A., 1946-
• Chang, Ku-ming Kevin, 1968-
• Zhong yang yan jiu yuan. Li shi yu yan yan jiu suo.

Description

x, 452 pages; 25 cm

Summary

"Philology—the discipline of making sense of texts—is enjoying a renaissance within academia after decades of neglect. World Philology charts the evolution of philology across the many cultures and historical time periods in which it has been practiced, and demonstrates how this branch of knowledge, like philosophy and mathematics, is an essential component of human understanding. Every civilization has developed ways of interpreting the texts that it produces, and differences of philological practice are as instructive as the similarities. We owe our idea of a textual edition for example, to the third-century BCE scholars of the Alexandrian Library. Rabbinical philology created an innovation in hermeneutics by shifting focus from how the Bible commands to what it commands. Philologists in Song China and Tokugawa Japan produced startling insights into the nature of linguistic signs. In the early modern period, new kinds of philology arose in Europe but also among Indian, Chinese, and Japanese commentators, Persian editors, and Ottoman educationalists who began to interpret texts in ways that had little historical precedent. They made judgments about the integrity and consistency of texts, decided how to create critical editions, and determined what it actually means to read. Covering a wide range of cultures—Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Indo-Persian, Japanese, Ottoman, and modern European—World Philology lays the groundwork for a new scholarly discipline."--

Subject

• Philology > History
• Philology

Genre/Form

• History
• History.

Note

• "A number of essays in this volume were first presented st the conference "The Global History of Philology", which was organized by the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, on October 28-29, 2008."--Acknowledgments.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 385-435) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Foreword / Fan-Sen Wang -- Introduction / Sheldon Pollack -- From book to edition: philology in ancient Greece / Franco Montanari -- The bride of Mercury: confessions of a 'pataphilologist / James E.G. Zetzel -- Striving for meaning: a short history of Rabbinic omnisignificance / Yaakov Elman -- Early Arabic philologists: poetry's friends or foes? / Beatrice Gruendler -- What was philology in Sanskrit? / Sheldon Pollack -- Reconciling the classics: two case studies in Song-Yuan exegetical approaches / Michael Lackner -- Humanist philologies: texts, antiquities, and their scholarly transformations in the early modern west / Anthony Grafton -- Mughal philology and Rūmī's Mathnavī / Muzaffar Alam -- The rise of "deep reading" in early modern Ottoman scholarly culture / Khaled El-Rouayheb -- Early or modern or late imperial? : the crisis of classical philology in eighteenth-century China / Benjamin A. Elman -- The politics of philology in Japan: ancient texts, language, and Japaneses identity / Susan L. Burns -- "Enthusiasm dwells only in specialization": classical philology and disciplinarity in nineteenth-century Germany / Constanze Güthenke -- The intelligence of philological practice: on the interpretation of Rilke's sonnet "o komm und geh" / Christoph König -- Philology or linguistics? : transcontinental responses / Ku-Ming Kevin Chang.

ISBN

• 9780674052864 (hardcover : alk. paper)
• 0674052862 (hardcover : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2014009973

OCLC

• 873238327
• SCSB-10666145

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library