Project Area C

Project C01 || Johannes Grave / Britta Hochkirchen
Comparative viewing: Forms, functions, and limits of comparing pictures

By addressing comparative viewing, this project is examining a practice that lends itself particularly well to analyzing how comparison is physically, materially, and contextually situated. The prime concern is to study the preconditions, merits, implications, and limits of comparative viewing. By focusing on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the project also contributes to the broader debate on historical changes in practices of comparison. Two individual studies – the first examining comparative practices in the context of connoisseurship; the second focusing on arrangements of pendant pictures – will demonstrate that a practice theory-oriented approach to comparisons can shed light on important but previously overlooked aspects of comparative practices.

Project C02 || Franz-Josef Arlinghaus / Walter Erhart
Incommensurable? The comparative self in the premodern and modern eras (11th – 19th century)

The subproject is addressing a paradox in experiencing and representing subjectivity that transcends the ages: the individual is supposed to be unique and beyond comparison while simultaneously being constituted by the social framing of comparative acts. Autobiographies can be seen as a privileged form of this paradox that is explicitly based on and documented by a diversity of historical and narrative practices of comparison. The subproject, situated at the crossroads of history and literary studies, works out narratives and strategies of comparing individuality in autobiographical texts from the eleventh to twelfth and the nineteenth century.

Project C03 || Willibald Steinmetz
Terms denoting comparison: The semantics of comparison from the sixteenth to the twentieth century

This subproject is exploring the semantics of comparison in Europe since 1500. The inquiry proceeds on three levels: terms denoting practices of comparison, explicit definitions of comparison, and speech acts (sentences) that perform comparisons. The basic hypothesis for the early modern period is that comparisons in the form of analogies were on the decline, whereas progressive comparisons, embedded in perceptions of competition, were on the increase. Finally, since 1800, there has been a growing importance of comparisons that stress equivalence in spite of difference or even complete incomparability.

Project C04 || Martin Carrier / Carsten Reinhardt
Overcoming barriers to comparisons in the natural sciences: The example of molecular genetics

The project is studying the role of performing comparisons both in gaining new knowledge and in integrating this knowledge into the system of science. It starts by observing the barriers to performing comparisons that emerge in conceptual change or in the contrast between divergent approaches. The project is searching for strategies with which to overcome these conceptual and practical barriers to comparison. This focuses attention on a heuristics of performing comparisons that emphasizes the use of metaphors and analogies. The project is examining these processes within the framework of the development of molecular genetics in the twentieth century.