The Textual Criticism of Sumerian Literature. By Paul Delnero. The Journal of Cuneiform Studies Supplemental Series, vol. 3. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2012. Pp. viii + 230. $89.95. [Distributed by ISD, Bristol, Conn.].

The Dead Sea Scrolls have demonstrated the fluidity of biblical and early Jewish texts in antiquity. How did early Jewish scribes understand the nature of their pluriform literature? How should modern textual critics deal with these fluid texts? Centered on the Serekh ha-Yaḥad - or Community Rule - from Qumran as a test case, this volume tracks the development of its textual tradition in multiple trajectories, and suggests that it was not understood as a single, unified composition even (...) in antiquity. Attending to material, textual, and literary factors, the book argues that ancient claims for textual identity ought to be given priority in discussions among textual critics about the ontology of biblical books. (shrink)

The presidential address of 2000, in which the author suggests emendations and/or explanations of seven proper names in the Koran, which have not been satisfactorily identified. These are: Ṭuwan, al-Jibt, Āzar, Idrīs, ʿUzayr, al-Rass, and ʿĪsā.

Textual criticism (examination) seeks to generate the most accurate version of an author's manuscript based on available copies. Textual criticism became prominent in the contemporary sense during the 19th and 20th centuries. Textual criticism studies, which were conducted extensively first in the West and then in the Islamic world, resulted in the development of several approaches aiming to identify the best version of the text under examination. Among the most prominent examples of these are the genealogical (stemmatic) (...) method in the West and the best text method in the Islamic world. In the best text method, which is known as the most widespread examination method in textual criticism activities, which gained momentum from the mid-19th century in the Islamic world, the examiner identifies a master copy which he thinks is the closest to the text of the author and exhibits the most solid text by taking certain criteria into consideration. Apart from obvious mistakes, the examiner does not make any changes in the master (umm) copy he selects, and does not include other copies in the text, only referring to different variants of the text. The principle of "adherence to the master copy" adopted in the method aims to limit interference in the text and prevent unnecessary and erroneous processes by the examiner. (shrink)

Abstract:The problem of evil is of significant concern to theologians and to philosophers of religion. Despite the extensive discussion this problem has received in various Anglo-American philosophical circles, relatively liĴ le aĴ ention has been paid to the theodical insights specifically of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa (ca. ninth–tenth centuries ѐ.ђ.). Here, it is sought to address this lacuna by highlighting certain theological insights within the Bhāgavatapurāṇa that offer explanations for the existence of suffering. These insights are also drawn upon in order to (...) formulate a response to the evidential problem of evil. Although this is not an aĴ empt to construct a comprehensive theodicy with these textual materials, it is highlighted how the Bhāgavatapurāṇa can address certain dimensions of the evidential problem for evil, and some pathways are noted for further inquiry into the theodical insights of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Alan Collett LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND FACTUAL REPORTING Novels frequently deal with real events. How is it that some theorists have been able to argue that, regarded as literature, such novels are always fictional? The answer is that it is usually possible to show that a work which we are prepared to call "literary" creates an imaginary world possessing its own properties. Itcan then be maintained that this imaginary world (...) constitutes the aesthetic object of the work and that only those properties internal to it are relevant to aesthetic judgment. It then follows that the meaning ofthe literary work is this imaginary world and that criticism is properly concerned with its elucidation. Or, to say the same thing in a different idiom: we should distinguish in the things said by critics between those sorts of remarks which help to establish a text's meaning solely by reference to internal features of the text and those sorts of remarks which, if they are aimed at establishing meaning, do so by reference to external evidence. In the case of novels dealing with real events, those sentences which describe particular events, situations, characters, and places (reports)1 play a role in the creation of the imaginary world of the work. The real events described will, of course, often be known to the reader, and indeed the effectiveness of a work may depend to a large extent upon the fact that it deals with known historical events. But in order to avoid treating such texts as factual works rather than as works of literature we should, the theory goes, stress plausibility and coherence above truth to the world. Aristode's rule that "a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility" sums up the way in which critical assessment can guard against confusing literary 282 Alan Collett283 works with informative works. Literary criticism concerns itselfwith the plausibility and coherence of accounts of real events at the expense of their truth. A literary artist will, therefore, be judged to be better the more his descriptions seem true in contrast with the historian whose descriptions must actually be true. The literary artist, on this traditional view, endows the events he describes with meaning. When those events are real events their meaning will be intelligible to the extent to which they reflect a convincingly possible reality. The accurate reporting of real events is perfecdy permissible always provided the events chosen make an artistic point by functioning in the narrative in a way which is probable or convincing. Accuracy, as such, is never a criterion of literary worth. The fictionality of literary works dealing with real events, then, is connected with the skill the author exhibits in usingthe events he chooses to describe in such a way that a meaningful imaginary world is created. This fictional world will mirror the real world via its internal coherence which excludes the contingendy true in order to make a plausible artistic whole, and one function of literary criticism proper is the fixing of the correct interpretation of the meaning of this fictional world. A recent reformulation ofthis traditional view, offered by S. H. Olsen in TL· Structure ofLiterary Understanding? contains some suggestions as to how it is possible to interpret literary practice so that report sentences can be understood to function other than as the bearers of truth. On this view, a literary work, as a peculiar kind of utterance, cannot be interpreted without reference to some context. And although a literary work may be pardy distinguished by its textual or structural features, the mere possession of such features is not in itself sufficient to make a text a literary work. Textual or structural features, Olsen argues, will serve an aesthetic function only when the decision is already taken that the text to which they belong is a literary work. Since the function of sentences cannot be determined simply on the basis of their linguistic features, they will need to be interpreted in order to be correctly understood. Interpretation will involve making assumptions about the purpose of the utterances in question and the assumed purpose will then determine how their linguistic and structural features are to be understood. Thus, in one of... (shrink)

Until very recently, feminist criticism has not had a theoretical basis; it has been an empirical orphan in the theoretical storm. In 1975, I was persuaded that no theoretical manifesto could adequately account for the varied methodologies and ideologies which called themselves feminist reading or writing.1 By the next year, Annette Kolodny had added her observation that feminist literary criticism appeared "more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coherent school or shared goal orientation."2 Since then, the expressed goals (...) have not been notably unified. Black critics protest the "massive silence" of feminist criticism about black and Third-World women writers and call for a black feminist aesthetic that would deal with both racial and sexual politics. Marxist feminists wish to focus on class along with gender as a crucial determinant of literary production. Literary historians want to uncover a lost tradition. Critics trained in deconstructionist methodologies with to "synthesize a literary criticism that is both textual and feminist." Freudian and Lacanian critics want to theorize about women's relationship to language and signification.· 1. See my "Literary Criticism," Signs 1 : 435-60.· 2. Annette Kolodny, "Literary Criticism," Signs 2 : 420.Elaine Showalter is professor of English at Rutgers University. The author of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, she is currently completing The English Malady, a study of madness, literature, and society in England. (shrink)

The article presents an edition of the previously unpublished letter from A. E. Housman to Grigory E. Saenger, written in Latin and dated 28 May, 1909, as well as a commentary on this text. The letter contains a criticism of Saenger’s 1909 edition of Statius’ Siluae. Housman evaluates the general approach of the edition and pronounces his judgement on two particular decisions made by the editor. The commentary treats both the general context of the letter and particular statements made by (...) Housman. The approach recommended by Housman is compared to those adopted in the major post-Saengerian editions of the Siluae; it is suggested that, while in certain respects some of the modern editions come close to what Housman endorsed, in other ways there is nothing among them to compare with it. (shrink)

The Vessantara J?taka is not only the most popular of all the Buddhist J?taka tales, but is important in the tradition as a whole, generally considered by the Therav?din tradition to display the epitome of the Bodhisatta’s perfection of giving. While most studies have focused on philological approaches, numerous questions as to the text’s structure and how to interpret individual parts within that structure have remained unresolved. My study shall employ the theory of ‘chiasmus’ to shed new light on both (...) the key message of the story and also the sub-themes within it. In terms of textual criticism, I shall first elucidate the chiastic structure of the text and discuss how this structure can provide insights on text-critical readings. In terms of interpretation, I shall then see how the structure clearly demarcates the text’s scope through its prologue and conclusion with surrounding framework, its paired parallel sub-themes, and its central climax point, all in the light of its chiastic structure. Finally, considering broader implications, on comparison with other recently discovered Buddhist textual chiasmi I shall present a tentative hypothesis as to the origins of such structures in the ‘bodhisatta’ literary genre. (shrink)

This book addresses the question of deconstruction by asking what it is and discussing its alternatives. To what extent does deconstruction derive from a philosophical stance, and to what extent does it depend upon a set of strategies, moves, and rhetorical practices that result in criticism? Special attention is given to the formulations offered by Jacques Derrida and by Paul de Man . And what, in deconstructive terms, does it mean to translate from one textual corpus into another? Is (...) it a matter of different theories of translation or of different practices? And what of difference itself? Does not difference already invoke the possibility of deconstruction’s “others”? Althusser, Adorno, and Deleuze are offered as exemplary cases. The essays in this volume examine in detail these differences and alternatives. The Textual Sublime is particularly concerned with how a text sets its own limits, borders, and margins, how it delimits what constitutes the text per se and how it invokes at the same time what is not determinately in the text. The textual sublime is that aspect of a text that deconstruction shows to be both an element of the text and what surpasses the text, what takes it outside itself and what ties it to differing philosophical, rhetorical, historical, and critical practices. (shrink)

The present "philological commentary" is directed at those who have decided to take time for reading the original text, at least in an English translation. The first volume "Textual Criticism" is intended to meet the difficulties caused by the fact that our text editions are based on manuscripts separated from the original by more than a millennium.

In spite of the objections of a few scholars, the common opinion considers the reconstruction of the original text of the New Testament as the primary task of textual criticism. In pursuing this goal, there is a certain antagonism between two methods, radical vs. reasoned eclecticism. These two ways of approaching the problem sharply differ from one another in view of a different emphasis on external and internal criticism. Radical or rigorous eclecticism hardly attributes a meaningful role to external (...) criticism in the decision-making process, whereas reasoned eclecticism, the so-called “local-genealogical method”, runs the risk of over-emphasising the weight of the external evidence. At a closer look, however, the Achilles heel common to both methods is situated on a deeper level, namely, the problem of the text in the second century. The virtual absence of significant direct evidence of the Greek text dating from the second century, opens the door to fantasy as well as to scepticism. What is needed for a balanced approach is a good portion of “historical-critical imagination” which sticks as closely as possible to the available data. A careful analysis of the textual trajectories which are clearly identifiable in the third century and maybe traceable before 200. A.D., allows us to formulate a valuable hypothesis concerning the earliest textual history to overcome undue fatalism concerning the achievement of the primary task of textual criticism. (shrink)

The founding text of modern hermeneutics. Written by the philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher as a method for the interpretation and textual criticism of the New Testament, it develops ideas about language and the interpretation of texts that are in many respects still unsurpassed and are becoming current in the contemporary philosophy of language. Contrary to the traditional view of Schleiermacher as a theorist of empathetic interpretation, in this text he offers a view of understanding that acknowledges both the (...) structurally and historically determined aspects of language and the need to take account of the activity of the individual subject in the constitution of meaning. This volume offers the text in a new translation by Andrew Bowie, together with related writings on secular hermeneutics and on language, and an introduction that places the texts in the context of Schleiermacher's philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

Abstract This paper is a close textual criticism of Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species. It argues that the book succeeds as interdisciplinary communication by promoting polysemy. The professional goals of two scientific communities are embedded in the text in such a way that each audience reads the call for co?operative action as implicit support for their own methods.

In "Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction", William Spanos examines the controversy, both in Europe and the United States, surrounding Heidegger and recent disclosures about his Nazi past. Not intended as a defense or apology for Heidegger's thought, Spanos instead affirms the importance of Heidegger's "antihumanist" interrogation of the modern age, its globalization of technology, and its neo-imperialist politics. The attack on Heidegger's "antihumanistic" discourse (by "liberal humanists" who have imported the European debate into the United States) (...) aligns ideologically with the ongoing policing operations of William Bennett, Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza, and others in the spheres of higher education and cultural production. Throughout his arguments, Spanos focuses not so much on Heidegger the historical subject, as on the transformative cultural and political discourses and practices, implicit in and enabled by Heidegger's interrogations of Being and Time, that have led to the contemporary emergence of the multiplicity of resistant "Others" colonized by hegemonic discursive formations. All the while he reminds us that Heidegger's philosophic interrogations eventually generate a diverse body of transgressive writing and an oppositional intellectual climate in the West. Spanos is author of "Repetitions: the Postmodern Occasion in Literature and Culture" (1987) and "The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism" (Minnesota, 1992), and the editor of "Martin Heidegger and the Question in Literature" (1980) and the co-editor of "The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism" (1982). This book is intended for those in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, political theory. (shrink)