Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World

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 Trüper 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, Trüper 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.

Henning Trüper is Researcher at Leibniz Zentrum für Kultur- und Literaturforschung, Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Typography of a Method: François 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).

List of Illustrations Preface: History in Meaning 1. After Philology, a Wild Goose Chase 2. The Suicide of Naffa' wad 'Etmân 3. The Travel Diary 4. The Archive of Epigraphy 5. Burdened with Gods 6. A Trade in Shadows Conclusion: The Grammar of Modernity Unpublished Source Bibliography Index