Mourning Philology ─ Art and Religion at the Margins of the Ottoman Empire

"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 the 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

Marc Nichanian was Professor of Armenian Languages and Culture in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. He is the author of Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century (Gomidas Institute, 2002). AQ BIO Marc Nichanian: PhD in Philosophy (France), with Jean-Luc Nancy. Professor of Armenian Studies at Columbia University until 2007. Currently Visiting Professor at Sabanci University, Istanbul, in the Department of Cultural Studies. As editor of the Armenian language series GAM, a philosophical review, published six volumes from 1980 to 2005. Recent publications in French; La Perversion historiographique (2006, translated into English by Gil Anidjar, The Historiographic Perversion, 2008), and a three-volume study, Entre l'art et le temoignage (2006-2008), on Armenian literature in the 20th century, of which the first volume was already available in English: Writers of Disaster (2002). He has translated Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Junger, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, into Armenian.

Jeff Fort is Assistant Professor of French at the University of California, Davis. He has translated a number of books by authors including Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Roubaud.