Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Literature in Javanese, the largest of the Austronesian languages and the world's tenth largest language by native speakers, spoken by more than 100 million people, is still being written after more than a millennium of recorded history.For centuries it has interacted with literatures written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay, Dutch, English and other languages, which were often translated into one another before reaching Java.And yet, as Ronit Ricci writes, although Javanese literature has "one of the world's richest and most unusual literary traditions … it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities."1Criticized by those who find the humanities useless to begin with, the field of Javanese literature can quickly be dismissed as a small, luxury discipline-what the Germans call an Orchideenfach or "orchid subject," being both exotic and expensive, with limited value on the labor market.However, the rather isolationist tendency of Javanese philology itself, marked by a certain "island mentality," may also have contributed to its own marginalization and subsequent demise in the institutions where literary and philological learning take place: It has consistently denied itself access to participation in Reading Javanese Literature with Questions of Theory in Mind philological encounters 9 (2024) 1-11
Source: Philological Encounters
Authors: Tony Day, Edwin P. Wieringa
Institution: University of Cologne
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4393099981