Suchergebnisse

The aim of this book is to challenge the assumptions made by the structuralist and post-structuralist schools of literary criticism. It defends and attempts to re-evaluate the kind of moral reflection associated with the critical legacy of such writers as Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson

Much recent scholarship has shown just how indebted the secular sciences of religion were to the Protestant world from which they grew. Yet this "Protestant world" is typically described schematically, as if Protestantism offered a coherent worldview or even a consistent set of doctrines. A different picture emerges if we deepen our historical horizon, and explore the reflexes, aspirations, and norms that have found a home in the Christian (in this case, Protestant) theological imagination. This "Christian archive" was a heterogeneous place, with room for many things that we would now call secular or even profane. Protestant reform in fact began by condemning this heterogeneity, insisting that much of what the church had come to see was sacred was, at best, only and all too human. Yet centuries of conflict in Europe over the truth of Christianity only pluralized this archive further. The nineteenth-century history of religion grew less out of "Protestantism," in other words, than out of the sedimented mixture of theological, historical, philological, and anthropological materials inherited from these earlier moments. It was, moreover, also an intellectual project that discovered new uses for these materials and thereby opened new horizons of humanistic inquiry. This article makes this argument with reference to sacrifice—a theological challenge for Christian thinkers from the outset of the tradition, but especially for Protestants; a magnet for diverse historical, anthropological, and theological reflections; and a productive zone of inquiry for the nineteenth-century German philosophers, philologians, and "higher critics" of the Hebrew Bible who together helped create the modern history of religion.

Political theory as textual criticism -- How to teach kings to read history : humanist culture and the disenchantment of absolutist power -- Political power in the archives : from reason of state to critical history -- In the workshop of politics : Amelot de La Houssaye and the methods of unmasking Venice -- How to read a subversive : decoding reason of state of the self -- The Machiavellian reformation : critical technologies of reading and the culture of personal prudence -- An enlightened prince reads Machiavelli, and a philosophe publishes The prince

AbstractThis article considers style in Persian literary history and its critical rhetorical and hermeneutical roles for poets and critics in the medieval and Safavid-Mughal eras. It explores how tarz (manner) emerged as a hermeneutical term in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and achieved a central position in sukhansanjī (evaluating speech) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This account of tarz—grounded in its historicity and multivalent implications—offers new insights into language for early modern Persian literary history, which is often periodized as sabk-i hindī (Indian style) or tāza-gūyī (fresh-speaking). Through a close reading of Safavid-Mughal tazkiras (literary compendiums), this contribution examines tarz as an operating concept deployed by a number of prominent tazkira writers. Finally, the article concludes by discussing this legacy's impact on twentieth-century scholarship.