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This book presents a comprehensive cultural history of the language
sciences in nineteenth-century Germany.In contrast to fields like
anthropology, the history of linguistics has received remarkably
little attention outside of its own discipline despite the
undeniable impact language study has had on the modern period. ""In
Babel's Shadow"" situates German language scholarship in relation
to European nationalism, nineteenth-century notions of race and
ethnicity, the methodologies of humanistic inquiry, and debates
over the interpretation of scripture. Author Tuska Benes
investigates how the German nation came to be defined as a
linguistic community and argues that the 'linguistic turn' in
today's social sciences and humanities can be traced to the late
eighteenth century, emerging within a German tradition of using
language to critique the production of knowledge.In this volume,
Benes suggests that nineteenth-century philologists interpreted
language as evidence of ethnic descent and created influential
myths of cultural origin around the perceived starting points of
their mother tongue. She argues that the origin paradigm so
prevalent in German linguistic thought reinforced the historical
and ethnic focus of German nationhood, with important implications
for German theologians, cultural critics, philosophers, and racial
theorists. ""In Babel's Shadow"" also contextualizes the importance
of linguistics to modern cultural studies by arguing that the
cultural significance attributed to language in twentieth-century
French philosophy dates to the late eighteenth century and has
clear precedents in theology. Benes links the German tradition of
reflecting on the autonomous powers of language to the work of the
fathers of structuralist and poststructuralist thought, Ferdinand
de Saussure and Friedrich Nietzsche.""In Babel's Shadow"" makes
clear that comparative philology helped make language an important
model and informing metaphor for other modes of thinking in the
modern human sciences. Cultural and intellectual historians,
scholars of German language and literature, and linguists will
enjoy this illuminating volume.
In an age of rising nationalism and expanding colonialism, the
science of language has been intimately bound up with questions of
immediate political concern. Taken together, the essays in this
volume suggest that the emergence of language as an autonomous
object of discourse was closely connected with the consolidation of
new and sometimes competing forms of political community in the
period following the French Revolution and the global spread of
European power. This is the common thread running through the seven
individual studies gathered here. By deliberately juxtaposing the
European, academic configuration of modern linguistic research with
the more practical, extra-European activities of missionaries,
colonial officials, or East Asian literati, the authors explore the
tensions between forms of linguistic knowledge generated in
different geopolitical contexts, and suggest ways of thinking about
the role of social science in the process of globalization.
Despite being a pillar of belief in the Judeo-Christian tradition,
the idea of revelation was deeply discredited over the course of
the Enlightenment. The post-Enlightenment restoration of revelation
among German religious thinkers is a fascinating yet
underappreciated moment in modern efforts to navigate between
reason and faith. The Rebirth of Revelation compares Protestant,
Catholic, and Jewish reflections on revelation from 1750 to 1850
and asserts that a strategic transformation in the term's meaning
secured its relevance for the modern age. Tuska Benes argues that
"propositional" revelation, understood as the infallible
dispensation of doctrine, gave way to revelation as a subjective
process of inner transformation or the historical disclosure of
divine being in the world. By comparatively approaching the
unconventional ways in which Protestantism, Catholicism, and
Judaism have rehabilitated the concept of revelation, The Rebirth
of Revelation restores theology to a central place in modern
European intellectual history.
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