Imagery as Method: The Rhetoric of Intellectual Practice as Embodied Labor in Early China

Description

This study invites critical attention onto an understudied topic in classical Chinese thought and literature—namely, "labor" as a specific source of imageries and figurative language. Within this frame, the study focuses on the figuration and interpretation of intellectual practice as a form of embodied labor, a phenomenon that emerged in pre-imperial China and gained prominence during early imperial times (ca. 221 BCE-220 CE). Central to my investigation is a rhetorical body of four tropes of physical labor—plowing, weaving, fishing, and hunting—that, through rhetorical figures such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and analogy, came to embody a constellation of values and methods toward the arts of governance, cultivation, learning, and writing, all of which constituted an empirical area of working with intellectuality.

Period	5 Apr 2024
Event title	Arts Faculty Research Seminar Series
Event type	Seminar
Organiser	FACULTY OF ARTS