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Reading Ornament
Author(s) -
Dembeck Till
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/oli.12002
Subject(s) - philology , scholarship , reading (process) , ornaments , scripting language , literature , sociology , linguistics , history , philosophy , art , computer science , feminism , style (visual arts) , law , political science , gender studies , operating system
This paper puts the most fundamental philological operation into the center of the theory of culture: the seemingly trivial act of recognizing the shape of a letter in the “ornamental” abundance of the material text. Culture is described as a comprehensive term for all mechanisms, which interrelate social events with their “scripts,” that is to say, with their proto‐textual foundations. Culture continuously, but variably, determines what is actually significant in the potential ornaments of “social text.” The common quest of philology and cultural studies is to re‐evaluate this text's seemingly ornamental details and to uncover their significance. In order to reunite these only seemingly oppositional approaches, literary scholarship must put genuinely philological operations in the center of its methodological repertoire.