Lexington Books Babel in Russian and Other Literatures and Topographies: The Tower, the State, and the Chaos of Language (Crosscurrents: Russia's Literature in Context)

This study analyzes the biblical Tower of Babel story, a cautionary tale that accounts for the diversity of languages and peoples, in Russian literature and other topographies. The author pursues its linking of language, architecture, and society as well as its relevance in art and literature over centuries. To come to terms with a perceived disorder in the realm of language, alternative explanations and projects for remediation abound. The disorder and diversity themselves find expression in art, literature, and philosophical reflection and caused the emergence of a historical linguistics. The ambition of the builders-with its social and organizational premise-reemerges in both political and material form as cities, states, and monumental constructions. Utopian aspirations and linguistic claims permeate both revolutionary notions of universality and the romantic essentialism of the nation state. These in turn provoke dystopian critique in literature and film. As Martin Meisel reveals in this study, the wrestle with language in its recalcitrant instability and imperfect social function enters into dialogue with the celebration of its diversity, elasticity, and creativity. Review [A] richly rewarding pendant volume. . . . Babel in Russian's horizon is modern Russian literature and culture, but its scholarly contribution finally has more to do with the wealth of information it collects and constellates than an argument that begins with Nimrod and ends with A. R. Ammons. The overriding effect of the intricate web of connections Meisel weaves in Babel in Russian is to suggest that the realization of the sublimity the Tower was intended to embody is finally to be found not in the imagined edifice but in its ongoing reception in Western culture.--Modern Philology Meisel takes the biblical account of the divinely forestalled tower of Babel as his point of departure for a suggestive consideration of the resulting "confusion of tongues" as a figure for chaos itself. Drawing on a dazzling array of texts (religious, philosophical, political, narrative, lyric, dramatic, filmic), the author reveals the extent to which the fraught relationship between chaos and order, design and disarray, richness and ruin, energy and fixity has been framed in terms of language--as the rift between word and world, as the non-correspondence of word and word that results from the dispersal of peoples and the proliferation of cultures, the blighted prospects for understanding and cooperation (let alone the construction of towers), and the longing for recognizable equivalents. The upside to all this divergence and difference is the proposition that what's needed (and possible) is not uniformity but unity, less a matter of being the same than of being in contact. In Meisel's learned discussion, what issues from that circumscribed report in Genesis is a cascade of hermeneutic possibilities that proceed from familiar melody to harmony to polyphony to a veritable canon of voices from centuries, genres, lands, and, aptly, languages. The result is a rich meditation on chaos that generates, associates, uncovers, and always, always illuminates. Reading it is a joy.--Cathy Popkin, Columbia University Meisel's book should be read by everyone who takes the study of language seriously. Against the background of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Meisel examines language as an instrument of order and of chaos at the same time.The author's remarkable erudition and analysis extend from Sumerian literature to "Blade Runner," and much in between.--David Sperling, Hebrew Union College As a follow-up to Chaos Imagined, Martin Meisel explores how language and chaos make and unmake each other. Babel is another coruscating contribution shot through with Meisel's sly humor and extraordinary erudition.--R. Darren Gobert, Duke University This book reaches back into a Biblical past--Babel as origin of "linguistic chaos"--with a theoretical panache th