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The course seeks to (1) introduce students to the textual foundations, that is, the “canon”, but also to the dominant modes of exegesis of the three Abrahamic traditions; (2) help students develop an understanding of what the challenges and limits, but also the continued promise(s) of textual approaches in the study of religion are.
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This course is structured in four parts. The first part reviews the nexus between philology and Orientalism in the work of 19th- and 20th-century scholars of religion such as F. M. Müller, but also studies the emergence in the 21st century of new paradigms (“future philology”, distant reading) in the textual study of religion. The second part provides an overview of the scriptural canons of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, while also examining issues of power and authority in the construction, past and present, of these canons. The third part deals with interpretive techniques in the three Abrahamic traditions, from premodern types of scriptural exegesis to modern and contemporary ones. The fourth part explores religious reading techniques and interpretive practices in terms of their performative, ritual and material dimensions.
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