Description
This paper offers new insights into a rhetorical body in ancient Chinese literature and discourses—namely, the metaphorical appropriation of a constellation of intra-house structures (gate/door, hall, room, stairway, wall, etc.), positions (house-owner, adherent, host, guest, etc.), and embedded spatial-orientational experience (in-out, up-down, etc.). Tentatively encapsulated as “intra-house metaphors,” such utterances constitute a repository of rhetorical language sustaining the configuration and imagination of a variety of social, intellectual, and literary matters (for example, “gate/door” as a commonplace trope for the entry toward an imagined community or ontological/epistemic realm; “house” for that community or realm taken collectively; a specific intrahouse position or movement for one’s status, achievement, or epistemic level, etc.). The study elaborates on such complexity with three lines of inquiry. First, it illustrates the diversity of intrahouse metaphors by examining their embedded rhetorical forms and meanings and their uneven distributional patterns among different traditions or “schools” over time. Second, the study investigates this rhetorical body as an integration of specific spatial-orientational experience and a set of socially inscribed structures and norms. The structures of such metaphors coordinate with the sociology of inclusion, exclusion, and institutional affiliation, all sedimented in ancient ritual and political orders and thus appropriated in various contexts with circumscribed variability. Finally, the study complexifies the issue by discussing its varying instantiations beyond any single concentric circle, but potentially toward the multi-centered accumulation and proliferation of authority and cultural capital—a paradox aesthetically perplexed by the myth of an imagined “inside.” Theoretically, the study also situates itself in dialogue with references such as Bourdieu, Blumenberg, and Lakoff & Johnson.| Period | 11 Apr 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | American Oriental Society 235th Annual Meeting 2025 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Boston, United States, MassachusettsShow on map |