| Abstrakt: |
Abstract: a1_Following the studies by Douwe Draaisma, Harald Weinrich and Aleida Assmann, this essay explores the role of imagination and metaphors in the process of ordering, classifying and preserving knowledge in the so-called historia litteraria works from the Early Modern Age. It starts from the insight that strategically employed metaphors are not a mere ornament decorating these syntheses of historical and literary knowledge, but they possess (similarly to ancient mnemonics) a function which is constitutive for the organising of knowledge and the reflexion of what is to be regarded as knowledge. The historia litteraria works are from the beginning accompanied by a predilection for metaphors of „libraries“, „picture galleries“, „archives“ or „temples of honour“, to which a spatial nature is common, and metaphors of „trees“, „blossoms“, „growing“ and even „grafting“, which share an organic, vegetative imagery. Discussing two important historia litteraria projects from the 1770s in Bohemian lands (Abbildungen böhmischer und mährischen Gelehrten und Künstler by Nikolaus Adaukt Voigt, Ignaz Born and Franz Martin Pelzel, and works on the history of learning by a Moravian scholar Ludwig Zehnmark), the study shows the opposing functioning of spatial and vegetative metaphors. |
