Mourning Philology

“Pagan life seduces me a little more with each passing day. If it were possible today, I would change my religion and would joyfully embrace poetic paganism,” wrote the Armenian poet Daniel Varuzhan in 1908. During the seven years that remained in his life, he wrote largely in this “pagan” vein. If it was an artistic endeavour, why then should art be defined in reference to religion? And which religion precisely? Was Varuzhan echoing Schelling’s Philosophy of Art? Mourning Philology draws on Varuzhan and his work to present a history of the national imagination, which is also a history of national philology, as a reaction to the two main philological inventions of the nineteenth century: mythological religion and the native. In its first part, the book thus gives an account of the successive stages of orientalist philology. The last episode in this story of national emergence took place in 1914 in Constantinople, when the literary journal Mehyan gathered around Varuzhan the great names to come of Armenian literature in the diaspora

Showcases innovative approaches to Latin literature by reading textual absence as a generative force for literary interpretation and reception. Includes chapters by a wide range of scholars, covering some of the main authors of the Latin literary tradition, often in dialogue with modern literature and philosophy.

The law and the fact : the 1994 campaign -- Between amputation and imputation -- Refutation -- Testimony : from document to monument.

'Germanic Philology: Perspectives in Linguistics and Literature' offers new, compelling, and thought-provoking contributions to the field of Germanic Linguistics. Nine authors from three different continents (North America, Europe, and South America) present in this edited volume their latest research on such diverse topics as Old High German, Old Saxon and Early New High German poetry, Yiddish, German Heritage speakers in the U.S., Germanic language periodization, paleography, and gender issues in Modern Standard German. 'Germanic Philology: Perspectives in Linguistics and Literature' strives to rekindle dialogue and discourse about topics in Germanic Linguistics while at the same time providing innovative and interesting talking points to the discipline in an international, trans-Atlantic framework. The articles featured in this volume will appeal to students and instructors of Germanic Linguistics alike as well as to anyone interested in this subject.

Preliminary Material /M. M. BRAVMANN -- PREFACE /M. M. BRAVMANN -- PHONOLOGICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL STUDIES /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE VOWEL I AS AN AUXILIARY VOWEL /M. M. BRAVMANN -- A PHONETIC LAW IN THE JUDEO-ARABIC DIALECT OF BAGHDAD /M. M. BRAVMANN -- SOME ASPECTS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF SEMITIC DIPHTHONGS /M. M. BRAVMANN -- BI-CONSONANTAL NOUNS OF ROOTS III W ('AB, 'AḪ, ḤAM) /M. M. BRAVMANN -- A CASE OF QUANTITATIVE ABLAUT IN SEMITIC /M. M. BRAVMANN -- ON TWO CASES OF CONSONANT CHANGE IN MODERN ARABIC DIALECTS /M. M. BRAVMANN -- HEBREW ŠTAYIM ('TWO'), SYRIAC ŠTĀ ('SIX') AND A TURKIC ANALOGUE /M. M. BRAVMANN -- CONCERNING THE BORDER-LINE BETWEEN CONSONANT AND VOWEL /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE HEBREW PERFECT FORMS: QĀṬELĀ, QĀṬELŪ /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE 3RD PERS. SING. FEM. OF THE PERFECT OF ROOTS III Y/W IN ARABIC /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE ARAMAIC NOMEN AGENTIS QĀTŌL AND SOME SIMILAR PHENOMENA OF ARABIC /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE PLURAL ENDING -ŪT- OF MASCULINE ATTRIBUTIVE ADJECTIVES IN AKKADIAN /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE ORIGIN OF SOME ARABIC PRONOUNS /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE FORMS OF THE IMPERATIVE (AND JUSSIVE) IN THE SEMITIC LANGUAGES /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE SEMITIC CAUSATIVE-PREFIX Š/SA /M. M. BRAVMANN -- SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC STUDIES /M. M. BRAVMANN -- GENETIC ASPECTS OF THE GENITIVE IN THE SEMITIC LANGUAGES /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE SYNTACTIC BACKGROUND OF SEMITIC NOUNS WITH PREFIX MA- AND OF PARTICIPLES WITH PREFIX MU- /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE INFINITIVE IN THE FUNCTION OF “PSYCHOLOGICAL PREDICATE” IN SYRIAC /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE EXPRESSION OF INSTANTANEOUSNESS IN ARABIC /M. M. BRAVMANN -- SOME SPECIFIC FORMS OF HYPOTAXIS IN ANCIENT ARABIC /M. M. BRAVMANN -- SYRIAC DALMĀ “LEST”, “PERHAPS” AND SOME RELATED ARABIC PHENOMENA /M. M. BRAVMANN -- ARABIC LĀKIN(NA) AND RELATED EXPRESSIONS /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE ORIGIN OF ARABIC BA'DA “AFTER” /M. M. BRAVMANN -- AN ARABIC SENTENCE-TYPE EXPRESSING “INNER COMPULSION” /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE IDEA OF “POSSESSION” IN LINGUISTIC EXPRESSION /M. M. BRAVMANN -- ARABIC PARALLELS TO THE ENGLISH PHRASE /M. M. BRAVMANN -- EXPRESSIONS BASED ON THE NOUN YAWM- “DAY” /M. M. BRAVMANN -- ARABIC ASLAMA (ISLĀM) AND RELATED TERMS /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE ORIGIN OF THE PRINCIPLE OF 'IṢMAH: MUḤAMMAD'S “IMMUNITY FROM SIN” /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE “COMPLETION” OR “IMPROVEMENT” OF A LAUDABLE DEED: AN ANCIENT ARAB ETHICAL MOTIF /M. M. BRAVMANN -- SEMITIC INSTANCES OF “LINGUISTIC TABOO” /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE ONOMATOPOETIC ORIGIN OF SOME TERMS FOR THE CONCEPT “SUDDEN” /M. M. BRAVMANN -- “SATISFYING” AND “RESTRAINING”: ARABIC KAFĀ (KFY) > KAFFA /M. M. BRAVMANN -- ARABIC MA'TAM “MOURNING ASSEMBLY” AND RELATED ETYMA /M. M. BRAVMANN -- AKKADIAN KIPRU( M), PL. KIPRĀTU( M) AND ETHIOPIC KANFAR /M. M. BRAVMANN -- ARAMAIC MESAR, NEO-HEBRAIC MĀSAR “TO SURRENDER (SOMEONE) ” /M. M. BRAVMANN -- AN ARABIC PARALLEL TO BENEDICERE /M. M. BRAVMANN -- NORTH-SEMITIC ḤAYYĪM/N “LIFE” IN THE LIGHT OF ARABIC /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE BIBLICAL CONCEPT “THE TREASURE OF LIFE” AND ITS SURVIVAL IN MANDAEAN AND CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES /M. M. BRAVMANN -- THE ROOT HWY “TO BE”, A PROTO-SEMITIC VERB /M. M. BRAVMANN.

From genocide, forced displacement, and emigration, to the gradual establishment of sedentary and rooted global communities, how has the Armenian diaspora formed and maintained a sense of collective identity? This book explores the richness and magnitude of the Armenian experience through the 20th century to examine how Armenian diaspora elites and their institutions emerged in the post-genocide period and used “stateless power” to compose forms of social discipline. Historians, cultural theorists, literary critics, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists explore how national and transnational institutions were built in far-flung sites from Istanbul, Aleppo, Beirut and Jerusalem to Paris, Los Angeles, and the American mid-west. Exploring literary and cultural production as well as the role of religious institutions, the book probes the history and experience of the Armenian diaspora through the long 20th century, from the role of the fin-de-siècle émigré Armenian press to the experience of Syrian-Armenian asylum seekers in the 21st century. It shows that a diaspora's statelessness can not only be evidence of its power, but also how this “stateless power” acts as an alternative and complement to the nation-state.

In a series of exquisite close readings of Arabic and Arab Jewish writing, Jeffrey Sacks considers the relation of poetic statement to individual and collective loss, the dispossession of peoples and languages, and singular events of destruction in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Addressing the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Elias Khoury, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Shimon Ballas, and Taha Husayn, Sacks demonstrates the reiterated incursion of loss into the time of life—losses that language declines to mourn. Language occurs as the iteration of loss, confounding its domestication in the form of the monolingual state in the Arabic nineteenth century’s fallout. Reading the late lyric poetry of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in relation to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, Sacks reconsiders the nineteenth century Arabic nahda and its relation to colonialism, philology, and the European Enlightenment. He argues that this event is one of catastrophic loss, wherein the past suddenly appears as if it belonged to another time. Reading al-Shidyaq’s al-Saq ‘ala al-saq (1855) and the legacies to which it points in post-1948 writing in Arabic, Hebrew, and French, Sacks underlines a displacement and relocation of the Arabic word adab and its practice, offering a novel contribution to Arabic and Middle East Studies, critical theory, poetics, aesthetics, and comparative literature. Drawing on writings of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Theodor Adorno, and Edward W. Said, Iterations of Loss shows that language interrupts its pacification as an event of aesthetic coherency, to suggest that literary comparison does not privilege a renewed giving of sense but gives place to a new sense of relation.

For a world mired in catastrophe, nothing could be more urgent than the question of survival. In this theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking book, Adam Y. Stern calls for a critical reevaluation of survival as a contemporary regime of representation. In Survival, Stern asks what texts, what institutions, and what traditions have made survival a recognizable element of our current political vocabulary. The book begins by suggesting that the interpretive key lies in the discursive prominence of "Jewish survival." Yet the Jewish example, he argues, is less a marker of Jewish history than an index of Christianity's impact on the modern, secular, political imagination. With this inversion, the book repositions Jewish survival as the supplemental effect and mask of a more capacious political theology of Christian survival. The argument proceeds by taking major moments in twentieth-century philosophy, theology, and political theory as occasions for collecting the scattered elements of survival's theological-political archive. Through readings of canonical texts by secular and Jewish thinkers—Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud—Stern shows that survival belongs to a history of debates about the sovereignty and subjection of Christ's body. Interrogating survival as a rhetorical formation, the book intervenes in discussions about biopolitics, secularism, political theology, and the philosophy of religion.