Aus unseren Neuerwerbungen – Sprachen und Kulturen Asiens, Afrikas und Ozeaniens 2023.10

Genre net­works and empire: rhetoric in ear­ly impe­r­i­al Chi­na
A decolo­nial read­ing of Han Dynasty rhetoric reveals the log­ics and net­works that gov­erned ear­ly impe­r­i­al Chi­na
In Genre Net­works and Empire, Xiaoye You inte­grates a decolo­nial and transna­tion­al approach to con­struct a rhetor­i­cal his­to­ry of ear­ly impe­r­i­al Chi­na. You cen­ters ancient Chi­nese rhetoric by focus­ing on how an impe­r­i­al matrix of pow­er was estab­lished in the Han Dynasty through gen­res of rhetoric and their embod­ied cir­cu­la­tion, and through epis­temic con­structs such as the Way, heav­en, rit­u­al, and yin-yang.
Through the con­cept of genre net­works, derived from both ancient Chi­nese and West­ern schol­ar­ship, You unlocks the mech­a­nisms of ear­ly Chi­nese impe­r­i­al bureau­cra­cy and maps their far-reach­ing influ­ence. He con­sid­ers the com­mu­ni­ca­tion of gov­er­nance, polit­i­cal issues, court con­sul­ta­tions, and the reg­u­la­tion of the inner quar­ters of empire. He close­ly reads debates among gov­ern­ment offi­cials, pro­vid­ing insight into their efforts to gov­ern and legit­imize the regime and their embod­i­ment of dif­fer­ent schools of thought. Genre Net­works and Empire embraces a vari­ety of rhetor­i­cal forms, from edicts, exam essays, and com­men­taries to instruc­tion man­u­als and memo­ri­als. It cap­tures a range of lit­er­ary styles serv­ing the rhetor­i­cal pur­pos­es of praise and crit­i­cism. In the con­text of court doc­u­men­ta­tion, these genre net­works reflect sys­tems of words in motion, medi­at­ed gov­ern­men­tal deci­sions and acts, and forms of gov­ern­men­tal log­ic, strat­e­gy, and rea­son.
A com­mit­ted work of decolo­nial schol­ar­ship, Genre Net­works and Empire shows, through Chi­nese words and writ­ing, how the rul­ing elites of Han Chi­na forged a lin­guis­tic matrix of pow­er, a book that bears impli­ca­tions for stud­ies of rhetoric and empire in gen­er­al.
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Jew­ish Lit­er­ary Eros: Between Poet­ry and Prose in the Medieval Mediter­ranean
In Jew­ish Lit­er­ary Eros, Isabelle Levy explores the orig­i­nal­i­ty and com­plex­i­ty of medieval Jew­ish writ­ings. Exam­in­ing medieval prosime­tra (texts com­posed of alter­nat­ing prose and verse), Levy demon­strates that sec­u­lar love is the com­mon theme across Ara­bic, Hebrew, French, and Ital­ian texts. At the cross­roads of these spheres of intel­lec­tu­al activ­i­ty, Jews of the medieval Mediter­ranean com­posed texts that com­bined dom­i­nant cul­tures‘ lit­er­ary stylings with bib­li­cal Hebrew and oth­er ele­ments from Jew­ish cul­tures. Levy explores Jew­ish authors‘ treat­ments of love in prosime­tra and finds them cre­ative, com­plex, and inno­v­a­tive.
Jew­ish Lit­er­ary Eros com­pares the mixed-form com­po­si­tions by Jew­ish authors of the medieval Mediter­ranean with their Ara­bic and Euro­pean coun­ter­parts to find the par­tic­u­lar moments of inno­va­tion among tex­tu­al prac­tices by Jew­ish authors. When viewed in the com­par­a­tive con­text of the medieval Mediter­ranean, the evolv­ing rela­tion­ship between the mixed form and the theme of love in sec­u­lar Jew­ish com­po­si­tions refines our under­stand­ing of the ways in which the Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture of the peri­od nego­ti­ates the hermeneu­tic and the­o­log­i­cal under­pin­nings of Islam­i­cate and Chris­t­ian lit­er­ary tra­di­tions.
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