University of Heidelberg

Visual Arguments

Researcher: Dr. Martin Hofmann

This sub-project investigates the function of maps in scholarly discourses in late Imperial China. It proposes that certain maps were employed as visual arguments, supplementing, emphasizing, and clarifying textual statements. In order to highlight specific issues and persuade others, scholars adjusted the outline of their maps and often relocated mountains, rivers, and borderlines. Exactness in terms of scale and spatial relations, which are so relevant for our contemporary conception of a map, were of minor relevance to them. Thus, this project scrutinizes how scholars embedded maps into textual discourses, delineates what maps were able to demonstrate that words could not, and analyzes what, if any, distinct argumentative strategies the use of maps entailed.

Paratexts

Researcher: Prof. Dr. Joachim Kurtz, Rui Magone (History of science, Lisbon)

The subproject on paratexts, conducted as part of the ongoing cooperation between the chair of intellectual history and the Max Plack Institute for the History of Science, aims to reconstruct the proliferation of argumentative practices in late imperial Chinese book culture. Paratexts, which can be defined as ancillary verbal and visual productions ranging from book jackets, prefaces, tables of contents, and colophons to seals, marginal notes and illustrative materials, are a particularly fertile ground for such explorations not only because they were indispensable parts of the public and private history of virtually every book published in Ming and Qina China but, more importantly, because they served as veritable “hotbeds of rhetoric” (J. Loveland). Exploring the forms and functions of, as well as the rhetorical tropes used in, paratextual writings, this subproject investigates the argumentative practices that enabled late imperial paratexts to act as strategic platforms for a broad variety of  epistemological and ideological negotiations between authors, publishers and readers.