Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World

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Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World examines the philology of orientalism. It discusses how European (and in particular German) orientalism has influenced the modern understanding of how language accesses reality and offers a critical reinterpretation of orientalism, ontology and modernity. This book pushes an innovative focus on the global history of knowledge as entangled between European and non-European cultures. Drawing from formal oriental studies, epigraphy, travel literature, and theology, Henning Trper explores how the attempt to appropriate the world by attaching language to the notion of a real reference in the world ultimately produced a crisis of meaning. In the process, Trper convincingly challenges received understandings of the intellectual genealogies of oriental scholarship and its practices. This ground-breaking study is a meaningful contribution to current discourses about philology and significantly adds to our understanding about the relationship between discursive practices, cultural agendas, and political systems. As such, it will be of immense value to scholars researching Europe and the modern world, the history of philology, and those seeking to historicise the prevalent debates in theory.

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This is easily the most serious and sophisticated study of Orientalism, going well beyond arguments about its relationship with imperialism to see how philology in particular came to represent a sustained anxiety about legibility and the very possibility of a theory of reading. Far from being an intellectually marginal or purely instrumental field of scholarship, Orientalism, Philology and the Illegibility of the Modern World turns out to be the privileged site for an epistemological crisis in modern Europe. * Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History, University of Oxford, UK *

Author Bio

Henning Trper is Researcher at Leibniz Zentrum fr Kultur- und Literaturforschung, Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Typography of a Method: Franois Louis Ganshof and the Writing of History (2014) and co-editor of Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).