Benes publishes In Babel's Shadow
Assistant Professor Kveta Benes has published her first book, called In Babel's Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany. The book is part of the series Kritik, published by Wayne State University Press.
Here is the book's descriptive blurb:
"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."