World Philology

465 Pages·2015·3.38 MB·English

by  Sheldon Pollock

W O R L D P H I L O L O G Y

W O R L D P H I L O L O G Y
Edited by
Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman,
and Ku- ming Kevin Chang
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2015
Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
World philology / Edited by Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku- ming
Kevin Chang.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674- 05286- 4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Philology— History. I. Pollock, Sheldon I., editor of compilation.
II. Elman, Benjamin A., 1946–, editor of compilation.
III. Chang, Ku- ming Kevin, 1968–, editor of compilation.
P61.W67 2014
400—dc23 2014009973
Contents
Foreword vii
Fan-Sen Wang
Ac know ledg ments xi
Introduction 1
Sheldon Pollock
1. From Book to Edition: Philology in Ancient Greece 25
Franco Montanari
2. The Bride of Mercury: Confessions of a ’Pataphilologist 45
James E. G. Zetzel
3. Striving for Meaning: A Short History of Rabbinic
Omnisignifi cance 63
Yaakov Elman
4. Early Arabic Philologists: Poetry’s Friends or Foes? 92
Beatrice Gruendler
5. What Was Philology in Sanskrit? 114
Sheldon Pollock
6. Reconciling the Classics: Two Case Studies in Song- Yuan
Exegetical Approaches 137
Michael Lackner
vi CONTENTS
7. Humanist Philologies: Texts, Antiquities, and Their
Scholarly Transformations in the Early Modern West 154
Anthony Grafton
8. Mughal Philology and Rūmī’s Mathnavī 178
Muzaffar Alam
9. The Rise of “Deep Reading” in Early Modern Ottoman
Scholarly Culture 201
Khaled El- Rouayheb
10. Early Modern or Late Imperial? The Crisis of Classical
Philology in Eighteenth- Century China 225
Benjamin A. Elman
11. The Politics of Philology in Japan: Ancient Texts,
Language, and Japa nese Identity 245
Susan L. Burns
12. “Enthusiasm Dwells Only in Specialization”:
Classical Philology and Disciplinarity in
Nineteenth- Century Germany 264
Constanze Güthenke
13. The Intelligence of Philological Practice: On the
Interpretation of Rilke’s Sonnet “O komm und geh” 285
Christoph König
14. Philology or Linguistics? Transcontinental Responses 311
Ku- ming Kevin Chang
Notes 333
Bibliography 385
List of Contributors 437
Index 439
Foreword
FAN-SEN WANG
There seems to be no better place than the Academia Sinica in Taiwan to
host a conference on the global history of philology and support the publica-
tion of a book on world philology. Its Institute of History and Philology,
where I work, is one of the very few institutions in the world that unites his-
tory and philology in its mission. Moreover, the institute was founded with
an intentionally internationalist character, being the fi rst to apply Western
philology and historical methods to Chinese material and then to contribute
to global scholarship with its fi ndings. Its vision and orientation aim at a
comparative history of important philological traditions around the world.
The institute’s remarkable sense of scholarly internationalism was attested
already by its founding director, Ssu-n ien Fu (1896–1 950). He proclaimed
that his institute would work on “materials not bound by countries,” and
would draw its methods “from unlimited regions, in order to . . . t ake part
in the scholarly successes that have so far been accomplished in other
countries.” The head of the historical section of the institute, Yinke Chen,
had trained in history and philology at Harvard and Berlin. He applied his
knowledge of Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Mongolian, among other languages,
to decipher Chinese historical texts that w ere rendered problematic by me-
dieval transliterations of the names of foreign persons and places. Later
devoted to Tang history, Chen articulated a view of the multiple ethnicities,
languages, and religions of the medieval states and dynasties that made up
China. His command of a great variety of historical languages, all acquired
abroad, and his sensitivity to the multiethnic nature of Chinese history im-
plicitly embodied the common sense of German classical philology, or Al-
tertumswissenschaft, and medieval Eu ro pe an history.
viii FOREWORD
The enthusiasm for Western philology among the found ers of the institute
was part of an international phenomenon that took place when non-W estern
civilizations were confronted with Western modernity in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Edward Said made famous the importance of philology
in the formation of Ernest Renan’s Orientalism and its impact on the colonial
world. But countries that w ere never under the direct rule of Western powers,
such as Japan, also welcomed the methods of Western philology. As Susan
L. Burns and Ku-m ing Kevin Chang point out in this volume, the fi rst Japa-
nese students to study philology in Eu rope, and indeed the fi rst two Japa-
nese holders of the chair in philology at the University of Tokyo, Kazutoshi
Ueda (1867– 1937) and Yaichi Haga (1867– 1926), took on the tasks of con-
structing the national language and literature of Japan, and of surveying lo-
cal languages and compiling dictionaries, with the philological methods
they had learned abroad. Japan’s national language movement soon inspired
Chinese intellectuals to create a unifi ed Chinese language, especially after
the foundation of the Chinese Republic in 1912. If this interest in the con-
struction of a modern national language arrived in China secondhandedly
through Japan, Fu and Chen at the institute w ere eager to apply their fi rst-
hand knowledge of Eu ro pe an philology to the renewal of Chinese learning.
The effort to study local languages and to compile dictionaries was also re-
produced by Ueda’s student Naoyoshi Ogawa (1869– 1947) in Taiwan, then a
Japa nese colony but the Academia Sinica’s new home after 1949. These
cases in Japan, in China, and at Fu and Chen’s institute all testify to the for-
midable impact of philology on non- Western scholarship.
Philology, traditional and new, could also, contrarily, serve as a bulwark
of traditionalism and nationalism. Japan ese nativists supported their cul-
tural essentialism with traditional philology in the eight eenth and nineteenth
centuries, and, even more strikingly, the Western- trained Haga argued that
modern Japan ese literature could be established without relying on imita-
tion of the West. Though internationally minded, Fu and Chen w ere also
motivated by a strong nationalism that resulted from the humiliation of their
country by Western powers and Japan, though they differed from conserva-
tive intellectuals who resorted to the ideology of national essence (guocui).
Even today there are philologists in different societies who assert the superi-
ority of their own language and its traditional scholarship.
Both modern and traditional philology, like other disciplines, run the
risk of becoming “sterile, ineffectual, and hopelessly irrelevant to life,” the
kind of scholarship Said criticized in one of his last essays (“The Return to
Philology”). From the 1880s on there had been criticism in Germany, the
FOREWORD ix
center of Eu ro pe an philological scholarship, of the kind of philological
work that (according to Fritz Ringer) was characterized by “technical prac-
tice” and “endless facts” without “theories” and “ideas.” Similar problems can
be found in philological work in Taiwan based on the conviction that good
philology and history must reject interpretation in order to be scientifi c and
objective, which was further based on the assumption that historical “facts,”
when adequately arranged, speak the truth by themselves. This assumption
was advanced most strongly by, ironically, none other than Fu. His follow-
ers continued Fu’s scientistic or “positivist” credo, to the extent that they
lost sight of the theoretical depth and cultural wealth of the Eu ro pe an phi-
lology that he advocated. Fu himself never believed that language or litera-
ture could exist in linguistic isolation or in a theoretical vacuum; he also
offered many theoretical interpretations, even speculations, about the ma-
terial he worked on. Attention to facts alone cannot suffi ce, and indeed, it
can impoverish humanist research.
For non-W estern countries, is modern philology worth celebrating?
Wouldn’t accepting philology amount to succumbing to Orientalism? Not
necessarily. The best antidote to the perils of traditionalism, sterile philol-
ogy, or even Orientalism seems to be what this book embodies: that is, phi-
lology’s commitment to historical refl exivity, nonprovinciality, and method-
ological and conceptual pluralism. They are also the qualities that Sheldon
Pollock argues the new philology of the twenty-fi rst century needs. Indeed,
even the author of Orientalism suggests that there are ways to overcome the
limitations of Orientalism, nationalism, traditionalism, and the fi xation on
words and facts. In Said’s terms, a philology-b ased humanism supports the
search for knowledge, justice, and even liberation.
The publication of this book is especially welcome at a time when the
Academia Sinica and philology as a discipline are working to give this
science a new life. The Academia Sinica has become a very different
institution since its relocation to Taiwan in 1949, thanks to po liti cal and
intellectual developments after World War II. The institution is more
diverse, incorporating many more disciplines in the social and natural sci-
ences. It is also more international in terms of the training and the aca-
demic activities of its faculty. The society that supports it has gained a new
po liti cal and cultural identity, in part by securing something the generation
of the institute’s found ers, Fu and Chen, longed for: democracy. Mean-
while, as Pollock shows in the introduction, philology as a scientifi c disci-
pline has lost its glory in the Western countries where it originated, and the
prestige of traditional philology has dwindled in East Asia. The question of