On Citing the Sahidic Version of Hebrews: Theoretical Reflections and Examples from Textual Practice

The Sahidic Coptic is one of the earliest and most important versions of the New Testament. Thus, it is essential that its witness be related to the Greek tradition with adequate methodological precision. This article attempts to pave the way for such an undertaking in the Epistle to the Hebrews, a New Testament book which, currently, lacks a major critical edition of its Greek text or an edition of its Sahidic version. Firstly, the present study offers methodological reflections on citing the Sahidic version, with a particular focus on transmissional, editorial, linguistic and translation-technical issues. And secondly, a selection of the most significant variant units in Hebrews is examined with a view to relating the Sahidic evidence to the Greek variant spectrum at each point.

It’s All Just Poetry: Writing ʿUmar ibn Abī Rabīʿah’s Life

The relationship between poetry and the poet’s life is complex, and reading a poem for biographical material can become a problematic exercise that constrains a poem’s interpretative possibilities. When writing about ʿUmar ibn Abī Rabīʿah (d. 93AH/712AD or 103/721), biographers and historians have shown a marked ambivalence in this regard. In early anecdotal narratives about his life and romantic adventures, events appear to derive their source material from episodes found in his poetry, whereas in later biographies of the poet, the poems tend to be understood as depicting emotional and symbolic truths, even if the events described did not actually happen. In either method of writing about ʿUmar’s life, the biographer finds the poet’s life story and persona to be filled with contradictions that are difficult to resolve. The embedding of poetry into anecdotes that narrate the poet’s life (in the form of events or emotional truths) resembles the tafsīr of the Qur’an through the Prophetic sīrah, in which Qur’anic verses are explained through the cementing of the text’s open-ended hermeneutic possibilities into fixed events and contexts. This article examines this relationship as a textual practice evolving through different biographies of the poet, and argues that the relationship points to a way of reading that presupposes a measure of extra-textual reality in the text, even where such a presupposition constructs an impossible biographical narrative replete with contradictions.

Content Analysis of Language-Sensitive Recruitment Influenced by Corporate Language Policy Using Topic Modeling

Language-sensitive recruitment is a language management tool frequently used by corporate organizations. However, its relationship with corporate policy is lacking; hence, this study aims to consider language-sensitive job advertisements from a computational text analysis perspective and explore the match (or mismatch) between language-sensitive recruitment (English, Japanese, or bilingual) and corporate language policy. This study uses corpus methods combined with topic modeling and text analysis to investigate the influence of corporate language policy on the textual practice of language-sensitive recruitment in a Japanese multinational corporation (MNC). This study finds a considerable discrepancy between recruitment needs and corporate language policy. It also finds that bilinguals still play a key role in crossing language boundaries 10 years post-mandate of the English language policy in this Japanese MNC. The study contributes to business language by exploring an additional scenario for linking language competency with actual recruitment needs. Thus, this study sheds light on the implementation of language-sensitive recruitment in a multilingual corporate context, affecting the communication patterns and recruitment tactics.

From Manuscript to Print in South and Southeast Asia

The historical shift from manuscript to print is only one aspect of the relationship between the two media, yet it has attracted the most attention. Influential media historiographies have either stressed or downplayed the degrees to which this particular change impacted textual practice in Asia. Playing one medium against the other, however, hinders our understanding of how print and manuscript have been shaping each other since the emergence of Buddhism. A broadened understanding of print that comprises early dhāraṇī estampage and later Chinese and Tibetan block prints, as well as the European printing press, shows that technological innovations in the reproduction, preservation, and distribution of writing spread out of and moved back into parts of South and Southeast Asia, recurring in multiple waves and in diverse forms, with differing local solutions defying attempts at a comprehensive media-centric periodization. Clay as the earliest preserved medium for the printed reproduction of Buddhist texts was replaced by paper as South Asian Buddhism spread northwest into Central and East Asia, impacting script cultures in Vietnam and Tibet and facilitating a division of labor which ensured that prints resembled manuscripts and manuscript came to dominate entire genres and social niches in the economy of the book. In the southern Himalayas, Tibetan block print and South Asian manuscript culture intermingled freely, even after the introduction of the European printing press, with Western print in isolated but striking cases upholding the prestige and supporting the ongoing reproduction of manuscripts. Similarly, in Sri Lanka and Thailand it was the colonial impact of print that led to a retooling and reevaluation of manuscripts as the key commodity through which to justify publishing and archiving efforts at the service of the project to build the nation-state, leading to the emergence of a new genre in South Asia, the library catalogue. Burma and Cambodia, with their interrupted trajectories toward Buddhist nationhood, saw interplay between manuscript, print, and epigraphy, in one case, and the detachment from the larger Thai manuscript lineage by the creation of a new mixed manuscript and print tradition in the other. More recent Buddhist traditions never experienced any of the passages from manuscript to print, emerging in a textual environment entirely constituted by the European printing press. Yet, in this and in the general contemporary Buddhist environment too, the manuscript persists in novel forms, either as a preliminary stage in the ontogenesis of any published or unpublished material or in the myriad instances in which jotting down on slips of paper contributes to the organization of the Buddhist everyday.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the difference geography makes

Ruez and Cockayne point out that queer theorist Eve Sedgwick’s reflections on paranoid and reparative readings accompanying one another came directly out of her queer political as well as textual practice in the U.S. Wrongly dismissed as mundane, this crucial contextualizing work is something geographers do especially well. Indeed, understanding the context for Sedgwick’s theories of paranoid and reparative reading is vital as we reflect on how her concepts travel across time and space.

The Issue of Criticizing the Text of the Short Story ʽWhere Love Is, There God Is Also’ by Leo Tolstoy (1885)

The article is devoted to the issue of criticizing the text of Leo Tolstoy's short story “Where Love Is, There God Is Alsoˮ (1885), its purpose is to substantiate the choice of the main source of the text for publication and to cleanse it of distortions. In the research literature, the issue of clarifying the history of formation of the given work as an artistic whole is open, details of the final stages of its creation have not been reconstructed, the editorship of this literary monument has not been concretized. The proposed work was performed in a certain sequence. First, all the discrepancies between the first lifetime editions of 1885–1886 were identified, and then a comparative analysis of them with handwritten materials was carried out. At the final stage, the classification of these discrepancies was correlated with the textual practice of the predecessors. As a result, the choice of the twelfth part of “The Works of Count L. N. Tolstoy” (1886) as the main text source for publication was theoretically justified, a list of recommended corrections based on manuscripts was compiled and argued. The tradition of criteria for scientific criticism of literary monuments has been supplemented with new principles. This is the transparency of editorial intrusions into someone else's text, the obligatory references to manuscripts or earlier publications in the list of corrections, a comprehensive disclosure of its composition (not a truncated format), the inadmissibility for a text critic to act as a co-author of the writer.

Editor's Editorial

This is the editor's editorial. In lieu of an abstract, here is the editorial's first paragraph: In the first issue of Textual Practice, the late Shakespeare scholar Terence Hawkes claimed, "It is never a good time to start a new journal." "The Humanities in particular feel marginalized and underfunded," he continued. "[T]hey sense themselves to be hopelessly at odds with a culture which has long abandoned any recognition of the value of their role."1 More than thirty years later, some of these words still ring very true.

Time, the Written Record, and Professional Practice: The Case of Contemporary Social Work

Drawing on a three-year ethnographically oriented study exploring contemporary professional social work writing, this article focuses on a key concern: the amount of time taken up with writing, or “paperwork.” We explore the relationship between time and professional social work writing in three key ways: (a) as a discrete, measurable phenomenon—how much time is spent on writing? (b) as a textual dimension to social work writing—how do institutional documents drive particular entextualizations of time and how do social worker texts entextualize time? (c) as a particular timespace configuration of lived experience—how is time experienced by professional social workers? Findings indicate that a dominant institutional chronotope is governing social work textual practice underpinned by an ideology of writing that is at odds with social workers’ desired practice and professional goals. Methodologically, this article illustrates the value of combining a range of data and analytic tools, using textual and contextual data as well as qualitative and quantitative frames of analysis.