Amelung, Iwo / Kurtz, Joachim (Eds.)
Reading the Signs: Philology, History,
Prognostication
Festschrift for Michael Lackner
2018 · ISBN 978-3-86205-615-6 · 592 S., geb. · EUR
85,—
Over more than 40 years, the sinologist Michael Lackner has studied a
broad range of issues in China’s past and present. On the occasion of his
65th birthday, this volume brings together essays from friends,
collaborators, colleagues, and students dedicated to the three fields of
research in which he has made his most lasting contributions: philology, the
histories of science and thought, and the study of prognostication. Michael
Lackner’s work in all these areas is connected by an intense engagement with
“signs”—texts and images but also objects, dreams, portents and omens—and
the semiotic, epistemic and political contexts in which they become
meaningful. The 25 contributions presented here highlight the fertility of
such a transdisciplinary approach. Reading signs in material, textual, and
visual sources dating from 2000 BCE to the present, scholars from four
continents address themes as diverse as early Chinese ritual and cosmology;
imperial and modern Chinese poetry, prose and drama; Chinese alchemy,
astronomy and mathematics; the theory and practice of divination and
prognosis; as well as exegetical traditions, political rhetoric, and
problems of translation. Many articles examine entanglements between China
and the West and offer comparative perspectives on developments in Europe
and the Islamicate world.
Contents
Tabula Gratulatoria List of Publications by Michael Lackner
Contributors To a Reader of Signs: A Dedication Iwo Amelung and
Joachim Kurtz
I. Philology
The Earliest Chinese Bells in Light of New
Archaeological Discoveries Lothar von Falkenhausen
Reading Newly Discovered Texts: Approaches to the
Guodian Text “Zhongxin zhi dao” 忠信之道 Michael Schimmelpfennig
The Language of Heaven Rudolf G. Wagner
Sage: An Unreadable Sign Chu Pingyi
Du Fu’s Long Gaze Back: Fate, History, Heroism,
Authorship Martin Kern
Matteo Ricci, On Friendship, and Some Latin Sources for his Chinese Book Christoph
Harbsmeier
The Chinese Traditional Method of “Full or Vacant
Characters” and the Grammar of Port-Royal Uchida Keiichi
The Formation of Modern Written Chinese: Writing
Categories and Polysyllabic Words Shen Guowei
How to Modernize Hermeneutics: Readings of Rilke’s
Late Poems Christoph König
II. History
Laozi and Internal Alchemy Fabrizio Pregadio
Drunken Talk: Political Discourse and Alcohol
Consumption during the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127 CE) Dagmar
Schäfer
Nara Singde, Assimilation, Acculturation, and
Identity in the Early Qing Erling von Mende
The Delayed “Triumph” of Yan Ruoqu’s Evidential
Studies during the Qianlong Era Benjamin A. Elman
Scientific News or Prognostic Interpretation: Chinese
Records of the 1874 Transit of Venus Lü Lingfeng
“Cosmopolitanism” in Late Qing China.
Local Refractions of a Global Concept Joachim
Kurtz
The Role of Alchemy in Constructing the Chinese
Scientific Tradition Iwo Amelung
Being Modern without the West? On the Futility of
Self-Assertion in Chinese Thought Marc A. Matten
Numbers as Signs: Conceptual Entanglements between
Mathematics, Divination, and Language in the Modern Era Andrea Bréard
III. Prognostication
Mis-reading the Signs, or: Theorizing Divination—
Chinese and Greek Lisa A. Raphals
Prognostication and Christianity in the Early Middle
Ages Klaus Herbers
Anxiety and Fear: Hexagrams “Ge” (49) and “Ding” (50)
in the Zhouyi daquan Tze-ki Hon
„An jenem Tag“. Über Prognose im Koran Georges
Tamer
Divination and Globalization: Some Comparative
Perspectives on Geomancy in Premodern East Asia Richard J. Smith
A Future Written in the Past: Prognostication in
Diary Novels of Republican China Carsten Storm
Fate, Freedom, and Will in European and Chinese
Discourses on Chinese Tragedies Natascha Gentz
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