Final Paper - beginning thoughts
The first professor of comparative philology at Oxford, editor of the series Sacred Books of the East, and translator of its first volume The Upanishads, F. Max Müller (1823-1900) stands out as one of the major contributors to the field of comparative religion and Orientalism. His work and scholarly agenda shaped not only the Vedic tradition and the Victorian understanding of the sacred East, but the translations in his series are still in print and continue to be used. Complete in fifty volumes, SBOTHE is a critical edition that provides translations of the sacred texts of six traditions: Brahaminism, Taoism, Janism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Islam.
Early in the Preface, Müller presents a justification for SBOTHE and writes the following: “In order to have a solid foundation for a comparative study of religions of the East, we must have before all things complete and thoroughly faithful translations of their sacred books” (xi). This is the centre of his justificatory argument and, as such, reveals significant terminological choices. The influence of his terministic environment can be tracked through his thesis as formulated here: the strategic moments of ambiguity in the words religions, faithful, books, and, east provide a map into a critical Burkian understanding of Müller’s project.
Context of Situation / Malinowski
AbbyNormal:
This is a fascinating project. I think that it could be very useful to think about how what KB says about Malinowski's idea, "context of situation," might apply here. Recall that we read that passage from RM where KB explains his understanding of how, for the translator (Malinowski), it was impossible to render meaning without having that context (a cluster of situational/cultural motives, I think). Burke got that idea from Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning so that would be the place to track down the Malinowski connection. It's a key idea that is also fundamental to Burke understanding of rhetoric generally, so you'd see all sorts of connections to rhetoric proper.
This is just one way to proceed, of course, but I thought I'd mention it in case it interests you.
Dave