tp86kuta – Page 11

Papers on Modern Literature V

Urban Spaces
Wednesday
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Room E

Chaired by Nicoletta Pesaro
Zhuyuan Han, “The Public Space in Reality and Imagination: The Coffeehouse and Teahouse as Cultural Phenomena in Republican Shanghai (1920s–1930s)”
Lok Yee Tang, “Rewriting as a Dialogue with Hong Kong: The Self-Rewriting of Yesi’s Cities of Memories, Cities of Fictions”
Giulia Rampolla, “Cityscapes of Otherness: The Representation of the Urban Space in Deng Yiguang’s Tales of Shenzhen”

Zhuyuan Han, “The Public Space in Reality and Imagination: The Coffeehouse and Teahouse as Cultural Phenomena in Republican Shanghai (1920s–1930s)”

The coffeehouse emerged as an unprecedented popular leisure spot in Shanghai during the 1920s. Accordingly, drinking coffee became prevalent among elite men and women who advocated a modern lifestyle, especially cultural intellectuals, and coffeehouses were soon favoured by many writers and artists for social gatherings. Such a kind of gathering resembled the phenomenon of “salon” indigenous to the 17th century France. In the meantime, the teahouse (chaguan), which had long functioned as a popular place for social gatherings in China, had experienced self-transformation to cope with the rapidly developing urban environment. Many teahouses in Republican Shanghai also embraced modern and Avant-grade aesthetic ideologies as coffeehouses did. The stimulated “tea talk meetings” (chahua hui) phenomenon then prevailed among Republican cultural elites, which was vital to inspiring literary and cultural productions. “Tea” and “coffee” became important cultural symbols, with the actual gatherings that happened in teahouses and coffeehouses extended to the print media. Two best examples are the “Coffee Seats” (Kafeizuo) column published on Shenbao in the late 1920s and the journal entitled Literature and Art Tea Talk (Wenyi chahua) first produced in the early 1930s, where articles on literary and artistic topics were solicited and cultural elites could participate another form of gathering in an imagined public cultural space. Referring to the notion of “public sphere,” “structure of feeling,” and some important memory theories, this paper is going to investigate how the coffeehouse and teahouse as both physical and imagined social spaces activated significant cultural implications and were closely related to the identity politics of intellectuals in Republican Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. Regarding the teahouse/coffeehouse as important public sites that accommodated multilayered elements of cultural modernity and “tea/ coffee” as conspicuous cultural symbols manifested in literature and popular culture, I intend to demonstrate that both the concrete architectures and abstract symbols are meaningful repositories of particular cultural memory. In this sense, I will also discuss how the coffeehouse and teahouse have evoked nostalgic reminiscence in contemporary China, and how particular architectures can inspire abundant reimaginations of the past and accommodate various kinds of memory.

Lok Yee Tang, “Rewriting as a Dialogue with Hong Kong: The Self-Rewriting of Yesi’s Cities of Memories, Cities of Fictions”

Undergoing the drastic social and political changes in Hong Kong since the 1990s, Hong Kong writers had attempted to respond to the historical context and to overcome the constraints of writing Hong Kong by means of rewriting their own works. Yesi (Leung Ping-kwan, 1949–2013), one of the most important writers and scholars of contemporary Hong Kong Literature, had repeatedly revised his travelogue Journey of the Worry Dolls (1983) until the finalised version Cities of Memories, Cities of Fictions was published in 1993. Self-rewriting, with the characteristics of double contextualisation and historicisation of the creative process, provided important cases to study how the conscious adjustments of writing intentions and strategies respond or intervene the social and cultural changes. However, previous studies on Yesi seldom put emphasis on the underlying meaning of the act of rewriting. As I would like to argue in this paper, Yesi intentionally adopted “self-rewriting” as a writing strategy to re-investigate the local cultural identity and evaluate the ossified representation of Hong Kong. My study aims to set out a new approach to the study of Yesi’s literary and cultural perspectives and provide a foundation for further studies on the literary phenomenon of “self-rewriting” in Hong Kong. This paper will first analyse how Yesi viewed the intersubjectivity of “dialogue” as a crucial attitude to understand the complexity of Hong Kong culture and to amend the existing misrepresentations. Based on the comparison of the versions of his works, the paper will then examine how the writer demonstrated a transtemporal “dialogue” through rewriting.

Giulia Rampolla, “Cityscapes of Otherness: The Representation of the Urban Space in Deng Yiguang’s Tales of Shenzhen”

This paper provides an in-depth overview of the urban fiction produced by the contemporary Chinese writer Deng Yiguang from 2010 onwards, after that he has permanently moved to Shenzhen. It has the intended purpose to shed some light on Deng Yiguang’s singular perspective upon the representation of the present-day Chinese metropolis and, more specifically, to investigate into the way he portrays the relationship between city dwellers and the urban space and into the meaning of the central role of the public spaces within his works. By mainly focusing on the analysis of some short stories selected from his three well-known collections, whose titles are Shenzhen zai beiwei 22°27–22°52, Ni keyi rang baihe shengzhang, and Shenzhen lan, which all belong to the so-called “Shenzhen series,” I will further attempt to demonstrate that the innovative strategies elaborated by Deng Yiguang to narrate the urban fabric, have exerted a crucial influence over the development of the aesthetic standards of 21st century “new urban literature” and have contributed to enrich the collective image of Shenzhen. Through the realist account of the private stories and of the hardships experienced by a wide range of citizens, who often belong to the lower social strata and never achieve their “urban dream,” this writer provides the reader with an insight into the human side of China’s restless processes of urbanisation and globalisation. Deng Yiguang’s literary works will be examined within the frame of “new urban fiction,” “subaltern literature,” and “Shenzhen’s narrative.”

Papers on Modern Literature IV

Poetry
Wednesday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm

Chaired by Gary Chi Chung Tsang
Gary Chi Chung Tsang, “A Study on the Hermeneutics and Annotation of ci Poetry in Republican China (1911–1949)”
Wai Tsui, “Using Classical Styles for New Experiences: A Study of Liao Entao’s 廖恩燾 (1864–1954) Overseas Poetry”
Chin Fung Ng, “Zhang Ruzhao (1900–1969) and Her Buddhist Lifestyle of ‘Agricultural Chan’”
Robert Tsaturyan, “A Study on the Question of ‘Trauma’ in Modern Chinese Poetry: Hu Feng and the Birth of Trauma Theory”
Paula Teodorescu (Pascaru), “Poet Yang Li 杨黎, from Macho Man to Rubber Man”

Gary Chi Chung Tsang, “A Study on the Hermeneutics and Annotation of ci Poetry in Republican China (1911–1949)”

Apart from publishing original texts, annotation is an important way for the propagation of classical literature in Republican China. The development of ci annotations had been thriving with a rapid increase in number in Republican China. These ci annotations not only help readers understand the texts through studying semantic, explanation of writing background, and appreciation of writing skills, some annotators may have infiltrated their thoughts of ci in their annotation works, which may have turned annotation into a form of hermeneutics. This may seem as a phenomena of inherence and transformation of theory of jituoshuo 寄託說 from Changzhou School. Jituoshuo is always an important topic in ci study, since it was proposed by the Changzhou School 常州派 in Qing Dynasty. One of the great impacts of jituoshuo in late Qing is encouraging ci writers to project their sadness and resentment towards politics in their ci compositions. However, when ci composition was less prevalent in Republican China (1911–1949), writers and scholars tried to imply their inherence and transformation of theory of jituoshuo in their ci annotation. This is a significance feature of ci study in Republican China that worth further investigation. This paper will examine and explore the relationship between ci annotation and hermeneutics, and the acceptance of the jituoshuo through study of difference ci annotation published in Republican China.

Wai Tsui, “Using Classical Styles for New Experiences: A Study of Liao Entao’s 廖恩燾 (1864–1954) Overseas Poetry”

A common critique of late Qing ci poetry is its “absence” in the so-called “literary revolution” that started in the late 19th century. Among all other genres, ci poetry appears to be particularly conservative in its forms, themes, imageries and language. Leaders of the new literary group, like Hu Shi, often criticised these ci poems being “limited in creativity” and “unrelated to the real world”. These comments continue to influence scholars of Chinese literature, assuming that ci has not evolved in an innovative manner facing the unique pressure of modernisation. The heavy borrowing of masterpieces in ci writing reinforces this general impression. The article will re-evaluate the ci poems involved and challenge this conclusion. The drastic change in political and social conditions from late Qing to the Republican era had inevitably affected the lives and thought of poets. Some poets even had the experience of travelling abroad. When expressing these new experiences, however, they chose a rather traditional form of literature, ci poetry. I focus on Liao Entao, a well-known poet and diplomat of Qing and Republic of China, who travelled extensively around South America, Japan, and Southeast Asia. He spent his final years in Hong Kong. The research argues that the persistence in using a traditional form is a strategy consciously adopted by the poet, in order to express complex feeling he encountered when experiencing something new. It will show how time-honoured tradition continued to influence and shape the modern literary field.

Chin Fung Ng, “Zhang Ruzhao (1900–1969) and Her Buddhist Lifestyle of ‘Agricultural Chan’”

The concept of “agricultural Chan” in Chinese Chan Buddhism can be traced back to medieval China. In premodern eras, many monastics followed the agricultural way of life of settling on mountains and to support themselves by farm labour. During the Republican period, such lifestyle was once again greatly advocated when Buddhism was under reform. Zhang Ruzhao (1900–1969) was one of the female monastics who responded to the reform and observed the practices of agricultural Chan. In the first half of her life, Zhang was not only a prominent poet but also an activist who has engaged in various political and feminist movements. But because of different personal and political disappointments, Zhang later decided to enter the Buddha’s world and eventually ordained as a nun. Not giving up literature even after turning to Buddhism, Zhang recorded her life through many literary writings such as poetry and prose. However, compared to other laywomen and nuns in the same period, far little attention has been paid to Zhang’s life and literature, not to mention her Buddhist practices and thoughts. In the light of this, this paper seeks to look into the idea of agricultural Chan Zhang adopted from the 1930s, the sources which inspired Zhang to put such lifestyle into practice, how she devoted her Buddhist life to the practice of agricultural Chan, and how such way of life was related to the Buddhist reform movement in modern China, by reviewing selected literary works, autobiographical accounts, and correspondence.

Robert Tsaturyan, “A Study on the Question of ‘Trauma’ in Modern Chinese Poetry: Hu Feng and the Birth of Trauma Theory”

In January 1945, Hu Feng 胡風 (1902–1985) published an article in the first issue of the magazine Xiwang 希望 (“Hope”) which he was editing during the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937–1945). The article, entitled Situating Ourselves In the Struggle for Democracy (Zhishen zai wei minzhu de douzheng limian 置身在為民主的鬥爭裡面), would later become a milestone for the discussion of “trauma” (chuangshang 創傷) in Chinese literary circles.
In this paper, I address the birth and discussion of the concept of “trauma” in the scope of Chinese literary-theoretical writings, its cultural, historical, and political manifestations in literary forms—namely poetry. On the examples of Hu’s poetry and poetry translation practices, I show that the symbolic use of poetic texts for national salvation, in line with his views on the centrality of the writer’s subjectivity and individuality, is unique to his practice of literature.
The research aims at establishing a foundation for poetry-based trauma studies in modern Chinese literature, in anticipation of the coming human-made disasters of the second half of the twentieth century, while making distinctions between the apocalyptic war-time poetry of Hu, the later menglong poetry of the generation that experienced the Cultural Revolution, and the ‘poetry of silence,’ as a response to the Tiananmen incident of 1989.
As the title of Hu’s most apocalyptic poem says, “Time has begun!” For the poet, it was the paradoxical time of both victorious resistance and defeat.

Paula Teodorescu (Pascaru), “Poet Yang Li 杨黎, from Macho Man to Rubber Man”

The Chinese avant-garde movement from the ’80s brought a sum of changes and innovations meant to redefine the margins of Chinese literature as it was known before. In poetry, the colloquial movement started in the ’80s through the voices of groups like Tamen, Feifei, Macho Men, and continued its activity during the commercial years of the ’90s and generated replicators in the 2000s: Xiangpi, Guopi, Jie, Haidao, settling its firm position on the Chinese literary scene. The constant presence in all these colloquial experiments is poet Yang Li who started his poetry journey along with the group Macho Men, adopting a frenetic, rebellious, colloquial, and masculine poetry. He then wrote poetry under the vague principles promoted by Feifei, and, in the end, became the main representative of the avantgardist project which still continues to stir up controversies and challenges, Eraser or Rubber Literature 橡皮文学.
This paper examines the way Yang Li moved from a colloquial style of creating poetry to another, culminating with xiangpi. Although Xiangpi was one of the dominant avantgarde sites at the beginning of the 2000s, marking a continuation of the colloquial trend in poetry in the new century, was rarely the object of analysis of research studies. The site ceased its activity, but the group that activated back then still continues to organise events and produce literature under this name, xiangpi. Some of the xiangpi “products” attracted a lot controversy and incited numerous discussions about poetry’s definition, the new margins of Chinese poetry, the relationship between Chinese classical poetry and Chinese contemporary poetry, Chinese poetry’s identity, the “anxiety” of Western influences and so on. The main director of this project is poet Yang Li who makes sure xiangpi and its principles continue to shape Chinese contemporary poetry.

Papers on Modern Literature III

Republican
Wednesday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room E

Chaired by Connie Ho-yee Kwong
Daniele Beltrame, “A Forward-Looking Nostalgia: Domesticating Change through Popular Fiction in Republican China. The Case of Bao Tianxiao”
Zheng Lin, “Chinese Facing the World in 1921: Guo Moruo and Yu Dafu as Case Studies”
Radek Pelucha, “Yu Dafu and the Problem of Self-Expression”
Connie Ho-yee Kwong, “Literary Translation as Strategy of Resistance: Ye Lingfeng’s Transcultural Reading of European War Literature during the Second Sino-Japanese War”
Hsiu-Mei Lo, “The Cross-border Journey of Wang Canzhi and the Meanings of Wang Canzhi as a Researcher for Her Mother Qiu Jin: Also, on the Significance of Being a Female Writer of Classical Literature Who Came to Taiwan in Postwar Period”

Daniele Beltrame, “A Forward-Looking Nostalgia: Domesticating Change through Popular Fiction in Republican China. The Case of Bao Tianxiao”

Popular fiction, or Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school, was a particularly successful literary trend in China from the late Qing through the Republican period. Most of its authors were active in Shanghai and many of them were offspring of gentry families from nearby cities like Suzhou. Literary talents from that city were the heirs to an outstanding tradition and in their fiction and essays, the nostalgia for Ming-Qing style and topics is evident, especially in the relevance they ascribed to qing 情. They enjoyed old-style literati habits: simplicity, restraint, and the preservation of established forms marked their works and lives. The pre-eminence of romance, mixed with a sentimental view of the past, traces a direct link with the past tradition of mournful distress for a lost paradise of sophistication, love and beauty at the beginning of the Qing era. The freedom of love, even though only enacted in the secluded space of the brothel, was also the early expression of modern consciousness. Through the example of Bao Tianxiao, a representative of Suzhou cultural tradition in modern times, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the Aufhebung of the old contributed to welcome still unchartered modernity. Bao Tianxiao was open to a by then inevitable progress but could not hide his nostalgia of the past, like writers from Suzhou after the fall of the Ming. In a circular motion to find solutions to national salvation and social change, nostalgia, and romance helped accommodating to the trauma of the present.

Zheng Lin, “Chinese Facing the World in 1921: Guo Moruo and Yu Dafu as Case Studies”

This paper aims to examine how Chinese intellectuals established their self-identity both as a Chinese and a cosmopolitan through their experience of studying abroad in the early 20th Century, choosing Guo Moruo and Yu Dafu as case studies, both of whom had studied in Japan and founded the Creation Society. Guo’s Goddess and Yu’s Sink were respectively the first collections of modern Chinese poems and fictions, both published in 1921.
In Goddess, Guo created a series of protagonists who represents a modern Chinese cosmopolitan enthusiastically embracing the new world and the new era. The Heavenly Hound is a declaration of self-discovery proudly howled by Chinese after the May Forth. The Phoenix Nirvana represents the death of old China and the rebirth of new China on the horizon of globalisation. In Morning the protagonist greets various regions of the world and thus maps an imaginative global trip.
With relation to Sink, the protagonist expressed the patriotic enthusiasm for his motherland beneath the repressed lust for women, and thus subtly shift the object of desire to China. The protagonists of Yu suffer from their self-identities tore between China and Japan. Since 1895, Japan had been the enemy meanwhile the model for China, therefore, the seduction of the Japanese prostitute embodies both the attraction and threat of modern Westernised imperialism to Chinese.
The literary texts of Guo Moruo and Yu Dafu demonstrate two typical sometimes ambiguously mingled self-identities of modern Chinese intellectuals in a global context during the early 20th Century, confident yet confused, cosmopolitan yet patriotic.

Radek Pelucha, “Yu Dafu and the Problem of Self-expression”

The aim of the proposed paper is to consider the early narrative texts of the modern Chinese writer Yu Dafu (1896–1945) from the two perspectives described below:
What kind of romanticism is Yu Dafu’s romanticism? The period of transition from premodern to modern Chinese literature offers itself for closer research into the nature of “isms” that were imported into the texture of the Chinese new literature. Thus, in the conceptual conglomerate that could be termed modern Chinese literary romanticism there can be seen: 1. features transmitted from the Western literary tradition 2. features found in the Chinese sentimental tradition 3. features that arrived through the Japanese recasting of the Western tradition.
What is the nature of Self in Yu Dafu’s early writings? How does this Self find its expression through the reactions of the characters in specific situations? The problem of self-expression is both the problem of the relation between the authorial self and the fictional self and the problem of the relation between the culturally conditioned self and the fictional self. The latter relation is of greater importance for the proposed paper as the culturally conditioned self articulates itself into the former relation. The problem of the Self is, in our view, the most different aspect of Yu Dafu’s romanticism as compared to the similar problem in the Western romantic tradition.

Connie Ho-yee Kwong, “Literary Translation as Strategy of Resistance: Ye Lingfeng’s Transcultural Reading of European War Literature during the Second Sino-Japanese War”

Against the grim backdrop of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Anti-Japanese war literature has become an important chapter of the modern Chinese literature since the 1930s. However, previous studies focused mainly on Chinese leftist writers’ anti-war writings and their national purpose. Discussions on Chinese modernist writers’ attachment to the leftist ideology and their contribution to the war-resistance literature have been very limited. A large corpus of Chinese modernists’ criticism and translation of European war literature in the particular historical context of China have been overlooked, thus making it a missing chapter in the study of Chinese Anti-Japanese war literature as well as Chinese modernist literature.
This paper focuses on Ye Lingfeng (1905–1975), a renowned Shanghai modernist writer, and his edited literary supplement “Yin Lin” of the newspaper Li Po published in Hong Kong during the wartime period. Ye Lingfeng came to Hong Kong in 1937 and published a certain number of criticism and translation of European war literature, including the Chinese translation of Henri Barbusse (1873–1935)’s famous anti-war novel Le Feu: journal d’une escouade (Under Fire: The Story of a Squad). This paper investigates how Hong Kong intellectuals tried to seek their freedom of speech by means of literary translation under the severe political censorship imposed by the British colonial government of Hong Kong. From a transcultural and trans-historical perspective, it also studies Barbusse’s and Ye Lingfeng’s individual perspective on war, internationalism and proletarian revolution, as well as the challenges facing them in Europe and Asia during the wartime.

Hsiu-Mei Lo, “The Cross-border Journey of Wang Canzhi and the Meanings of Wang Canzhi as a Researcher for Her Mother Qiu Jin: Also, on the Significance of Being a Female Writer of Classical Literature Who Came to Taiwan in Postwar Period”

Wang Canzhi (1901-1967) was the daughter of Qiu Jin, and both mother and daughter were female poets. In her early years, Wang Chanzhi attended the Department of Education of Daxia University (now East China Normal University). In 1929, she went to study aircraft manufacturing and aeronautics at New York University’s aviation college and served as an instructor after returning home. This made her life experiences and professional identity completely different from most modern female poets. Therefore, this thesis intends to explore Wang Chanzhi’s unique professional identity as an instructor in aviation to develop a discussion of the diverse professional identity of female poets. In 1933, Wang Canzhi edited her mother’s work Posthumous Collection of Qiu Jin Female Knight and appended her own Xiao Xia Poetry. In 1935, she published The thoughts After reading The Frost in June–About deceased mother Ms Qiu Jin. In 1953, she published the biography of her mother, Qiu Jin Revolutionary Biography. In short, the unique professional identity of Wang Canzhi as a researcher for her mother, Qiu Jin, is the second focus of this thesis. Finally, Wang Canzhi settled in Taiwan in 1953 and died in 1967. She was also one of the post-war female writers, but she was not a mainstream writer. Her fifteen-year life in Taiwan was almost unknown, and very little research has been done about Wang Canzhi. Therefore, discussing the significance of Wang Canzhi as a Taiwanese female writer after the war is the third focus of this thesis.

Appearances Can Be Revealing

Creating Credibility in Ancient Chinese Texts
Wednesday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room D

Organised by Christian Schwermann
Christoph Harbsmeier, Chair
Christian Schwermann, “Miraculous Evidence—The Fangmatan Tale of Dan’s Resurrection Revisited”
Paul Fahr, “Testimonial Evidence in Han Dynasty Historiography”
Felix Bohlen, “Commemorating, Narrating and Creating the Past—Aspects of Factual Narrative in Western Zhou Bronze Inscriptions”
Tobias Wilke, “The Mohist Way of Standardising Types of Evidence”
Thomas Crone, “To the Left and to the Right of the Ruler—The Testimonial Role of the Scribe in Early Chinese Literature”
Klaus Oschema, Discussant

In this panel, we propose to investigate the wide range of textual devices that serve to create credibility, or the appearance of it, in ancient Chinese texts. Are there ghosts, or aren’t there? Did an accused commit the crime he or she was charged with or not? Was the first Han emperor fathered by a dragon or not? Questions like these have been asked by Chinese authors since antiquity. Interestingly, these writers, whether they were literati in the broadest sense, legal scholars or historians, pursued similar strategies of authentication when articulating their doubts or presenting their evidence—for example, eyewitness testimony, anecdotal evidence, or authoritative sources concerning historical events and personalities. While some were concerned with asserting or questioning the truth claims of historical narratives or clarifying questions of guilt, others set out to create a circumstantial narrative plausibility—especially as long as a distinction between high-quality factual and inferior non-factual narratives was prevalent. Our survey will consider the entire spectrum of both received and excavated literature, ranging from bronze inscriptions and bamboo manuscripts to traditional historiography and philosophical treatises that developed methods of testing the reliability of statements.

Christian Schwermann, “Miraculous Evidence – The Fangmatan Tale of Dan’s Resurrection Revisited”

The Qin 秦 bamboo manuscripts excavated in 1986 from tomb number one at Fangmatan 放馬灘 include a document that claims to be an official account of the miraculous resurrection of a man called Dan 丹 in 297 BCE, allegedly submitted by a local vice magistrate to the royal scribe of the state of Qin in 269 BCE. Hitherto, this text has often been accepted at face value as an administrative document and accordingly considered a valuable new source on late Warring States religion. The present paper proposes to change perspective and to proceed from the assumption that it is an early precursor to medieval tales of the supernatural. From this point of view, it becomes obvious that the manuscript employs a wide range of elaborate textual devices to create an appearance of credibility, one of them being the contrivance to present the sensational story under the guise of an official administrative report. Following a retranslation of the manuscript, I will engage in a close reading of the text, focusing on the narratological analysis of devices that make the narrative plausible. Finally, I will try to explore some of the sources from which late Warring States authors drew when they were trying to create appearances of reliability.

Paul Fahr, “Testimonial Evidence in Han Dynasty Historiography“

One import device to lend credibility to a historiographical account is testimony. This may take different forms: an author may claim to have been eye-witness to a certain event himself, or he may refer to the words of others for confirmation of his story. Finally, the narrative structure of the historiographical work itself may convey a sense of testimonial evidence. This happens when a certain event is told as seen from the perspective of one or more particular characters being part of the story. Claims of testimony constitute a well-known element in Western historiography. The present paper argues that narrative procedures like these can be occasionally observed in historiographical works of the Han Dynasty (206/202 BCE–220 CE) as well, for example in the Documents of the Han (Hanshu 漢書). Proceeding from here, it discusses the function of testimonial evidence in these texts: when would an official historian consider it necessary to adduce testimonial evidence for his account; why would he do so; and when would he deem it appropriate to explicitly admit that there is no testimony for a certain episode?

Felix Bohlen, “Commemorating, Narrating and Creating the Past – Aspects of Factual Narrative in Western Zhou Bronze Inscriptions“

Because Western Zhou (1045–771 BCE) bronze inscriptions are remains of the period on which they report and since they can normally be dated with much greater accuracy than transmitted ancient Chinese texts, they are often believed to be also more reliable than the received sources. This belief appears to be confirmed by the contents of the inscriptions, which purport to conform with extra-textual reality. When claiming, to tell the truth, they establish what Stephan Jaeger calls a ‘pact of truthfulness’ (Wahrhaftigkeitspakt) between two entities involved in narrative inscriptional communication: the donor of the inscribed vessel on the one side, and her or his posterity on the other. However, just like in traditional Chinese historiography, the dominant mode of presenting past events in ancient Chinese epigraphy is narration, and, just like transmitted historical narratives, inscriptions can be highly subjective and biased when narrating the past. There are epigraphs such as the one on the “Basin of Scribe Qiang” (Shi Qiang pan 史牆盤, ca. 900 BCE), the narratives of which conflict blatantly with extra-textual reality. The present paper thus aims to uncover strategies of creating historical credibility in inscriptional narratives. How does the narrator adduce testimonial evidence for his account? Which devices does he or she employ to support their truth claims and make their narratives feel real? And why do they try to disguise the constructedness of the latter?

Tobias Wilke, “The Mohist Way of Standardising Types of Evidence“

In order to be able to judge a proposition, it is necessary to set up a gauge. This suggestion of imperishable plausibility was explicitly expressed in the Mozi’s 墨子 “Fei ming” 非命 chapters. Every claim, the Mohists argued, has to be examined according to the so-called Three Gnomons/Three Methods (san biao 三表 or san fa 三法): It must be tested against the precedent of the sage kings, against what the people heard and saw, and finally against its benefits for the state and the people. If the proposition meets all three criteria, it is considered valid. What appears to be a simple formula for verifying a proposition is actually an effective guideline for the creation of anecdotal and source evidence. It is this argumentative strategy that the Mohists themselves have continuously refined when composing the Mozi triads. If we take a closer look at the “Jian’ai” 兼愛 triad, we can even see how the formation of evidence according to the proposed Three Gnomons has shaped the evolution of these three chapters. While the first chapter of the triad merely shows arguments of the third type—i.e. abstract, hypothetical proofs— the second and third chapters increasingly also use anecdotal and source evidence. In this talk, I will first take a closer look at the Three Gnomons and then try to reveal how the Mohists used this method in the “Jian’ai” triad to create what they considered to be strong evidence.

Thomas Crone, “To the Left and to the Right of the Ruler—The Testimonial Role of the Scribe in Early Chinese Literature”

An important form of creating literary evidence is the invocation of eyewitnesses. With regard to the numerous historical anecdotes about the actions and words of ancient kings, emperors, and other rulers, which make up a large part of extant early Chinese narrative prose, court scribes (shi 史) seem to have been the ideal candidates to fulfil the role of eyewitnesses. For not only were they known for their constant presence (to the left and to the right of the ruler), but their records also enjoyed the reputation of capturing everything of significance with unyielding impartiality. It is therefore not surprising that in ancient Chinese literature, the reference to the presence of a court scribe appears to have already developed into a topos that served to certify the plausibility of narratives. In my talk, I will present and discuss some examples of such cases, most of which come from the pre-Qin corpus. I will focus on the questions of how these eyewitnesses are characterised in the respective narratives, in which ways they serve as literary devices to create credibility and which conclusions can be drawn from our insights for the understanding of these stories.

Manuscripts and Prints for Physicians and Laymen

Writing and Publishing Medical Knowledge in Late Imperial China
Wednesday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room D

Organised by Thies Staack
Chaired by Paul Ulrich Unschuld
Thies Staack, “Faithful Copying and Creative Change: The Yizong jinjian 醫宗金鑒 in Manuscripts”
Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira, “Books, Manuscripts, and the Publication of Folk Healing Knowledge in the Late Qing”
Crystal Tsing Tsing Luk, “Removing Religion from Chinese Medical Texts: The Production of the Shishi milu 石室秘錄 (1687–1688)”

In the past, research on the history of medicine in late imperial China predominantly focused on medical texts in terms of their apparent content. The agency of compilers, editors and publishers, that is, the role that individuals and institutions played in shaping and transmitting medical knowledge, has generally received far less attention. The same is true for printed and handwritten books as material objects. Too often they are still seen as mere carriers of medical texts, although their materiality can provide valuable information about the ways in which medical knowledge was produced and used.
This panel brings together the history of medicine and the history of the book in late imperial China. Focusing on the area of friction between manuscripts and prints, we ask what roles the two played for the collection, organisation and transmission of medical knowledge and also aim to identify more general differences between manuscripts and prints with regard to the content or the way contents are formatted and presented. We explore what can be learnt from paratexts, such as prefaces, and material features, e.g. format and layout, about the writers and/or compilers of medical works or the printing houses that published them, and finally we examine how far manuscript and print culture influenced each other in the field of medicine. Addressing these and other aspects, the present panel will shed new light on the writing and publishing of medical knowledge and late imperial book culture more generally.

Thies Staack, “Faithful Copying and Creative Change: The Yizong jinjian 醫宗金鑒 in Manuscripts”

In recent years, manuscripts from late imperial and early republican China have received more attention as sources for historians of medicine who are attempting to reconstruct the approaches to healing of the common people. At the same time, manuscripts also invite an analysis as material objects in themselves, which can shed further light on the role they played for their producers and users.
This paper focuses on the question of to what extent the compilers of medical manuscripts stayed faithful to the original when copying contents (texts or illustrations) from widely-available printed books. As a case study, it investigates eight specimens from the Unschuld collection of medical manuscripts that incorporate content copied from the chapters on smallpox of the imperially-commissioned Yizong jinjian 醫宗金鑒 (Golden Mirror of the Medical Tradition) first published in 1742. A comparison with the printed original will reveal to what extent contents were supplemented, deleted, reorganised, reformatted or combined with other medical or even non-medical contents in the course of the production of a manuscript. This in turn will shed further light on the function of each individual manuscript and the editorial choices in the background of this as well as the most likely identity of their compilers and/or users. The aim is for this paper to deepen our understanding of the relation between manuscript and print in late imperial book culture and to further elucidate the question when and why preference was given to one over another.

Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira, “Books, Manuscripts, and the Publication of Folk Healing Knowledge in the Late Qing”

In 1759, the scholar-physician Zhao Xuemin 趙學敏 compiled his Chuanya 串雅 (Corrected Recipes of Itinerant Healers). Based on later editions of this work, modern scholars have assumed that this text is composed of recipes collected from itinerant healers and that it was its author’s intention to transmit and preserve folk healing knowledge through the printed word. The original manuscript that Zhao Xuemin compiled probably never reached print, however, whereas the extant copies of this text have found numerous new editions.
Focusing on manuscripts and printed editions of the Chuanya produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this paper will trace the processes through which multiple agents created and recreated this text over the course of time. In contrast to past studies, which take the connection between the Chuanya and folk healing for granted, I argue that any conclusion should primarily consider the various editions of this work. By looking at the Chuanya from the perspectives of material culture and book history, this paper aims to clarify the following questions: Who produced the extant editions of the Chuanya, and why? How do printed editions differ from manuscripts in terms of medical knowledge? How have printed editions and paratexts constructed the image of the Chuanya as a single, coherent, and original work of folk medicine? More broadly, I argue that the case study of the Chuanya helps us understand the wider dimension around the authorship of recipe texts in late imperial China and beyond.

Crystal Tsing Tsing Luk, “Removing Religion from Chinese Medical Texts: The Production of the Shishi milu 石室秘錄 (1687–1688)”

The Shishi milu 石室秘錄 (Secret Records of the Stone Chamber), a well-known Chinese medical text, was originally compiled by the famous physician Chen Shiduo 陳士鐸 between the years 1687 and 1688. The text comprises dialogues between the Heavenly Master Qibo 天師岐伯, Leigong 雷公, Huatuo 華佗, Zhang Zhongjing 張仲景, and Sun Simiao 孫思邈, all of whom have long been celebrated as divine healers (Yaowang 藥王) in Chinese medical traditions.
Early editions of the Shishi milu state that five deities transmitted the original text in 1687 during a spirit-writing séance presided by Lüzu 呂祖, the deity-in-charge of many spirit-writing cults in Ming and Qing China. According to these accounts, it was Chen’s insistence that he kneeled before Lüzu and refused to stand up until the deity agreed to invite the most authoritative divine healers to transmit him the “true teachings and explanations of healing.”
The Shishi milu has had an enormous influence on Chinese medicine, both in practice and theory, since its first publication. While over fifty printed and manuscript editions had been produced between 1688 and 1960, the divine provenance and religious elements the text originally contained remain unknown to most readers. This paper aims to shed some light on the early creation of the text through the technique of spirit-writing, and examine how later editors either neglected its divine origins altogether or labelled them as “superstition” or “unimportant.”

Papers on Premodern Literature VII

Poetry II
Thursday
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Room C

Chaired by Joachim Gentz
Zornica Kirkova, “Poetry, Meteorology, and Politics—Rhapsodies on the Wind-Vane from the Early Western Jin”
Baoli Yang, “Poeticising Nativist Sentiments: References to Han 漢 and the Construction of Chineseness in Early Tang Poetry”
Loredana Cesarino, “Female Authors and the Literary Canon of the Tang Dynasty (618–907): The Case of the Courtesan Chang Hao”
Chunxiao Liu, “The Musicality of guóxiù jí Poems and Beyond”

Zornica Kirkova, “Poetry, Meteorology, and Politics—Rhapsodies on the Wind-Vane from the Early Western Jin”

After the Han dynasty rhapsodies on things (yongwu fu 詠物賦) became the most favoured form of rhapsodies fu 賦. These were shorter pieces in simpler style composed on one single subject,—either from the natural world or man-made objects. Soon after the establishment of the Western Jin 晉 (265–316) numerous rhapsodies were composed by leading poets and scholars of the period (Fu Xuan 傅玄, Fu Xian 傅咸, Zhang Hua 張華, Pan Yue 潘岳, and others) on the topic of the meteorological instrument xiangfeng 相風 (wind-vane). During Sima Yan’s (265–290) rule more rhapsodies are known to have been produced on the xiangfeng than on any other implement, nevertheless, this topic was never picked up again in later poetry. Rhapsodies on things, as yongwu poetry in general, have traditionally been considered as dealing merely with outer description of things and being devoid of deeper intentions and personal feelings. In this paper I will take a closer look at the surviving rhapsodies on the xiangfeng in a wider intellectual context and investigate their possible political connotations and the reasons for the sudden but shortlived popularity of the topic. My aim is to show how these compositions not only “investigate reality,” but may also present an attempt by a group of scholars to define the values of the new dynasty and their own role in the contemporary politics.

Baoli Yang, “Poeticising Nativist Sentiments: References to Han 漢 and the Construction of Chineseness in Early Tang Poetry”

Although Chinese cultural elites have maintained a keen eye on recognising the Chinese monarchy and making arguments on state craftsmanship in their writings since the beginning of Chinese writing history, it was not until the early Tang (617–906) when Chinese poets began to prominently utilise the word Han in their poems. Before the Tang, Chinese poetry discusses politics by aestheticising the suffering people in relation to the exploiting ruling class like in those in the Book of Odes or by lyricising the sublimity of the palaces, capitals, and imperial huntings in the Han rhapsody. Nevertheless, in the Tang dynasty, the imageries associated to Han appeared gradually more often in the works of Chen Zi’ang, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, among many others. The Han sometimes referred to the previous historical Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), insinuated the Tang dynasty, or functioned as a synecdoche for the Han Chinese ethnicity. Why did Han, originally a dynastic name, become such a signifier with multiple meanings in the Tang poetry? To address this question, this paper first discusses why writing related to the word Han in the Tang poetry differed from writing on other political issues in previous poetic panegyrics in terms of expressing the Chinese identity in pre-modern China. Then it focuses on one early Tang poet Chen Zi’ang to explore how his poems complicated the significance of the Han. I argue that Chen attached a nativist sentiment to the Han which was also the ideal historical period for him.

Loredana Cesarino, “Female Authors and the Literary Canon of the Tang Dynasty (618–907): The Case of the Courtesan Chang Hao”

According to S. Owen (2007, p. 309), the literary canon of the Tang dynasty (618–907) “has been filtered not through a tradition of scholarly preservation, but through acts of partial copying largely determined by the period taste”.
Starting from this assumption, this paper analyses three of the four poems ascribed to the Tang dynasty courtesan Chang Hao 常浩 (9th c.) using J. R. Tung’s (2000) “masculine mode of women’s representation” and Kolbas’s (2001) theory of the literary canon as a theoretical framework. It argues that Chang Hao’s poems have been included in the poetic canon of the dynasty because they were in line with the literary conventions used by the male literati and, as such, they did not represent a threat to the social and political order of the time, nor a violation of the so-called “male province of literature” (Feldman & Gordon 2006).

References:
Feldman, M., & Gordon, B. (eds). (2006). The courtesan’s arts: cross-cultural perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kolbas, E. D. (2001). Critical Theory and the Literary Canon. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
Owen, S. (2007). The Manuscript Legacy of the Tang: The Case of Literature. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 67 (2), 295–326.
Tung, J. R. (2000). Fables for the Patriarchs: Gender Politics in Tang Discourse. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Chunxiao Liu, “The Musicality of Guóxiù jí Poems and Beyond”

An anthology selects, categorises and preserves. Among the commonly recognised thirteen anthologies of Táng poetry compiled during the Táng dynasty extant today, the Guóxiù jí 國秀集 [A Collection of the Ripened Talents of the State] (compiled 744–745) stands out as it relied on musicality as a key principle of its selection. The more than 200 poems in this anthology thus serve as a fine corpus to explore the relationship between poetry and music during the Early and High Táng periods. The proposed paper traces the singability of Guóxiù jí poems based on whether it can be supported by further records (e.g. Dūnhuáng manuscripts), or whether it is suggested by formal features, the contents or titles of the poems. Since the musical implications evidenced by these poems are of varying degrees and appear in very diverse forms, special attention is paid to cases like exam poems (fèngshì 奉試), night-duty poems (yùzhí 寓值), and ‘mouth-howling’ poems (kǒuháo 口號) etc. It is found that although the precise performative modes of the Guóxiù jí poems are not yet retrievable, their singability is in most cases undeniable. This would seem to support the idea that the “adaptability to pipe and string music” (kěbèi guǎnxián 可被管絃) was indeed a basic criterion against which the poems were selected. More importantly, the Guóxiù jí offers a glimpse of how music and poetry, closely interrelated, played an important role in the social life of Táng literati.

Papers on Premodern Literature IV

Women and Bodies
Wednesday
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Room D

Chaired by Lisa Indraccolo
Wenting Ji, “Her Feet Hurt: Rediscover Female Body and Pain in Zaishengyuan (Destiny Of Rebirth)”
Rubén Jesús Almendros Peñaranda, “Foot Binding in Jin Ping Mei: A Foucauldian Reading Of Sex Control And Body Normalisation Mechanisms”
Mariana Zorkina, “Dialogue with the Canon: Digital Methods as a Tool to Articulate Gender Biases in Traditional Chinese Literary Criticism”

Wenting Ji, “Her Feet Hurt: Rediscover Female Body and Pain in Zaishengyuan (Destiny of Rebirth)”

Zaishengyuan (Destiny of Rebirth) written by Chen Duansheng (1751–1796) is a famous work of tanci which centres on the adventure of a cross-dressing female protagonist. Evolving from storytelling performance, tanci as a genre is usually rich in volume, rhymed in language, and dominated by female writers from the Jiangnan area in late imperial China. Being overlooked for decades, tanci has received few discussions especially on individual works, language expressions, and nuanced cultural connotations. Building on existing scholarship which focuses on gender studies, this paper approaches Zaishengyuan from sensory studies and investigates its representations of female body and sensations, especially feet and pain. Conducting close readings on foot-related plots and keywords tong and teng (both mean pain in Chinese), this paper argues that Zaishengyuan endeavours to demonstrate how women experienced the outside world with their body and sensations, and how bodily pain shaped the way the society and women themselves identified femininity. The story repeatedly associates physical pain with the female-exclusive practice foot-binding, while at the same time puts the bound feet into spotlight to address the female protagonist’s identity crisis that causes the psychological pain. Also, the involvement of mother in female body’s modification showcases the significance of maternal family lineage and the female community around tanci. Moreover, by contextualizing female pain in both the cinematic cross-dressing plots and the performative nature of tanci, Zaishengyuan reveals the embedded theatricality in gender identifications and redefines the realm of gender in fantasy as well as in reality.

Rubén Jesús Almendros Peñaranda, “Foot Binding in Jin Ping Mei: a Foucauldian Reading of Sex Control and Body Normalisation Mechanisms”

Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅, c. 1610) is the Ming dynasty erotic novel par excellence. From the very first modern reading by Lu Xun in the 1920s, ‘Jin-ology’ research has been focused on the obscenity of the novel, the misogynist ideology under the authorship and the gendered hierarchical relations between Ximen Qing and his concubines. However, it is rare to find a systematic reading of Jin Ping Mei concerning the power relationships issued by a social control system subjacent to sexual encounters. The aim of this paper is to use the thinking of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) about the relations between power and sex, mainly developed in his History of Sexuality (1976–1984), in order to analyze our novel in terms of sex control and body normalization mechanisms. Among the various body practices present in the novel, the paper will concentrate on the foot binding of women, a recurrent practice in imperial China, whose main objective was to reduce the free mobility of women and to stimulate male sexual desire. From the Foucauldian concept of body normalization and the feminist reading of Jin Ping Mei by Naifei Ding (2002), this paper will examine the obsession of Ximen Qing with Pan Jinlian’s small feet in order to prove that foot binding is an external representation of a “biopower” which tries to normalize the body of the female population.

Mariana Zorkina, “Dialogue with the Canon: Digital Methods as a Tool to Articulate Gender Biases in Traditional Chinese Literary Criticism”

The notion of quantitative approaches in the humanities is not new—they exist for over a century, bloomed with the Russian school of formalism in the first half of the 20 century and since then experienced several periods of revival, often connected to advances in computer technologies. However, until today the capability of digital approaches to go beyond simple quantification is often questioned. This paper showcases how statistics can be combined with traditional literary analysis in order to engage with the widespread ideas in Chinese traditional literary criticism and how in many cases simple quantitation in literary analysis can produce meaningful insights into the texts. As a primary example, the paper examines how literary critics of imperial China were describing female poets and their works—and in what aspects the criticism was based on personal biases rather than reality. For that end, this study uses stylometry, that is most commonly used for identifying authorship and distinguishing personal styles of writers. Works of female and male poets in the biggest available collection of Tang poetry—Quan Tangshi—are compared. The results of the analysis are juxtaposed with some of the statements about female poetry in traditional Chinese literary criticism. While accounts were not necessarily dismissive, some tropes—like describing women’s poetry as “emotional” or setting it against the “learned” tradition of writing—persisted. But, as the stylistic analysis shows, these statements can be questioned.

Papers on Premodern Literature III

Ming–Qing
Wednesday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room C

Chaired by Roland Altenburger
Elizabeth Smith Rosser, “’Good Wood on Crowdpleasers:’ Humour and Joke Collections of the Mid-Late Ming”
Yingyu Li, “Courtesan, Literati Gathering and Acting—Pan Zhiheng’s Dramatic Criticism and Literati Association in Nanjing in Late Ming (1573–1644)”
Roland Altenburger, “Sartorial Politics and Semiotics in Ming–Qing Novels: On Hats in Rulin waishi”
Teresa Görtz, “The Power of qi: Sensory Encounters Between Ghosts and Humans in Zibuyu”

Elizabeth Smith Rosser, “’Good Wood on Crowdpleasers’: Humour and Joke Collections of the Mid-Late Ming”
The mid to late Ming period was the stage to a huge proliferation in humour and joke publications. As part of a wider thesis which intends to situate this phenomenon within concurrent trends on the intellectual landscape, this paper focuses in on publications such as leishu 類書 and other forms of compiled collection in which the humour section comprises just one or a few sections. Humour categories were included in a wide variety of publications with professed purposes as diverse as chronologically ordered histories, civil service skill guides and literary quotation collections. These publications were consumed by a literate public who did so not just for their humorous content, as would be the case for standalone collections. This aspect appears to have caused a great deal of anxiety for the men who compiled them. Taking the authorial prefaces and other paratextual material as its focus, this paper looks at the strategies used to present and “sell” humour and jokes to a sceptical public. As the paper demonstrates through close textual analysis, compilers go to great lengths to justify its inclusion, almost to the point of defensiveness. From this attitude it is possible to infer wider prejudices against the acceptability of humour and joking within such contexts. Through this it is possible to pinpoint a juncture in changes in currents of thought and interpret joke and humour publications as a battleground upon which the playing out of a variety of Ming ideological conflicts can be clearly observed.

Yingyu Li, “Courtesan, Literati Gathering and Acting—Pan Zhiheng’s Dramatic Criticism and Literati Association in Nanjing in Late Ming (1573–1644)”

The association of literati was very popular in late Ming Dynasty, and its significance for the research of poetry and eight-legged essay has been recognized in academia. However, its influence on traditional theatre has not been fully understood. Literati gatherings based on different associations not only provide places and occasions for drama performance, but also closely interact with the development of drama including its creation, performance, and criticism, thus influencing the aesthetic style of Chinese traditional theatre. This article will focus on Pan Zhiheng, the most famous drama critic in late Ming, to discuss this topic in-depth, based on all his criticism materials. Nanjing, the culture centre of Ming Empire, used to attract numerous top courtesans and players as well as literatus of various social statuses. As a sojourner, Pan Zhiheng had ever lived in Nanjing for a long time and served as the important organizer, participant, and witness of gathering performance in Nanjing. He contributed many insightful dramatic criticisms and a number of documents commemorating those living events and courtesans that would not be recorded in history. In brief, combining with female roles, literati culture, and dramatic criticism, this article will take three literati gatherings involved with Pan Zhiheng at different times as clues, and investigate the connection between literati society and dramatic criticism. On basis of that, I expect to consider the future of this research subject from a broader perspective.

Roland Altenburger, “Sartorial Politics and Semiotics in Ming–Qing Novels: On Hats in Rulin waishi”

Vernacular novels have long been employed as sources on the social and cultural history of late-imperial China. The rich representation of aspects of everyday life included in them is considered particularly indispensable since we have few other sources that provide information on such matters. However, there always remains the question of how reliable and historically accurate these representations actually are to be considered. Recent contributions to the history of clothing and consumption in the Ming have pointed out to what extent the representation of dressing in novels such as Jin ping mei and Xingshi yinyuan zhuan indeed corresponded to actual phenomena and sartorial politics in late-Ming society and culture, focussing on sumptuary laws, their systematic violations, and gentry anxiously policing social boundaries (e.g., Clunas 1993, 2004, Wu 1999).
Rulin waishi, a novel written ca. 1730–1750, almost a century after the fall of the Ming, but nevertheless featuring a mid-Ming backdrop, has also been read along this line, and the historicity of its representation of Ming customs has often been emphasized. However, the early-Qing reform of sartorial customs was far-reaching, and the fact that in the mid to late Ming, sartorial norms were in a state of flux, may have additionally obfuscated Qing authors’ precise knowledge about them. This can be demonstrated through a specific focus on hats and the semiotics of sartorial character description in this that might have been closer to contemporary issues and the author’s personal situation than to the imagined historical past.

Teresa Görtz, “The Power of qi: Sensory Encounters Between Ghosts and Humans in Zibuyu”

Yuan Mei’s 袁枚 (1716–1798) work Zibuyu 子不語 (1788) is a compilation of ca. 750 zhiguai 志怪 (records of the strange) entries which forms a mosaic impression of the complexities of human life and its environments across the lands of 18th century Qing dynasty China. In Zibuyu, the largest discussion of human engagement with the environment falls on encounters with ghosts. While ghosts appear in many of the records and are usually described as making themselves known to humans through their words and visual appearance, those records with a description of a physical connection between human and ghost are remarkable because, in almost all stories detailing such physical contact, the focus in touching the human body lies exclusively on exhaled ghostly qi 氣. Focusing on sensory and bodily experiences, this paper scrutinizes the significance of qi as a form of differentiation between the categories “human” and “ghost” as well as the act of breathing or blowing air (chuiqi 吹氣) as a means of establishing and complicating the relationship between the human and other-than-human. Furthermore, this paper seeks to make comparisons to the descriptions of human-ghost encounters in other zhiguai contemporaneous to Zibuyu and attempts to refine the understanding of boundaries between human and ghost but also of socially acceptable and proscribed views of the existence of sentient life.

Papers on Premodern Literature II

Receptions and Adaptations
Wednesday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room C

Chaired by Kelly Kar Yue Chan
Severina Balabanova, “Talent (cai) and Method (fa) in Discourses about Classical-Language Short Stories: A Research on Keywords”
Lingjie Ji, “‘A Handbook of Chinese Literature’: Herbert Allen Giles (1845–1935) and His Gems of Chinese Literature (1884)”
Ashley Liu, “From Premodern xiaoshuo to Modern Fiction: The Untangling of xiaoshuo and Fiction via Digital Research and a Critical Examination of Lu Xun’s Scholarship on Premodern Fiction in the Context of Sino-Japanese Literary Modernity”
Mingming Liu, “In the Mirror of the Dream: Cao Xueqin, Borges, and Chinese Avant-Garde”
Kar Yue Chan, “Adaptation of Cantonese Opera: From Tradition to Gendered Challenges”

Severina Balabanova, “Talent (cai) and Method (fa) in Discourses about Classical-Language Short Stories: A Research on Keywords”

Throughout Chinese literary history, scholars have defined, classified, and explained short stories in the classical language according to different criteria. From the discourse on narrative in Liu Xie’s (465–522) Wenxin diaolong, Liu Zhiji’s (661–721) Shitong, to Gu Yanwu’s (1613–1682) continuing Liu Zhiji’s analysis of writing methods in Rizhi lu, all reflect core terminology and concepts in discussing the relation between narrative and history, biography, and literature, revealing the interpretation of “narrative text” and “short story” in different epochs, thus making evident specifics in literary development.
This article focuses on the discourse of classical-language short stories from different periods as seen in the works of historians, literary scholars, and authors of literary works, prefaces, and notes to literary collections, to investigate from a historical perspective the interpretation of two key terms in Chinese literary criticism: talent (cai) and method (fa). These two concepts in literary creation formulate the criterion of talent and mastery in writing respectively and reveal the key to continuity and creativity in writing narrative texts. We can observe how the context of these discourses has influenced the interpretation of the two key concepts, thus elucidating the process in which the understanding of classical-language short stories has evolved from historical to the fictional narration. I will concentrate on related works from different periods (for example Liu Zhiji, Hong Mai, Liu Chenweng, Hu Yinglin, Pu Songling, etc.), analysing the specifics of this discourse on the narrative through keywords, and emphasising its value in the context of Chinese literary history.

Lingjie Ji, “‘A Handbook of Chinese Literature’: Herbert Allen Giles (1845–1935) and His Gems of Chinese Literature (1884)”

This paper is a historical study of a translation anthology Gems of Chinese Literature (1884) and its significance in the history of the conceptualisation of Chinese literature through English translation. Gems of Chinese Literature is a collection of the English translation of Chinese literary works by the British sinologist Herbert Allen Giles (1845–1935). Published in 1884, it contains 112 Chinese prose essays and six Chinese poems translated into English, arranged chronologically from the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 B.C.) to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). In addition to the fact that it is the first English anthology focusing on the Chinese guwen (classical prose) writings, it was designed and presented by Giles as a pioneering compendium of Chinese literature in general. By examining the choice of Chinese authors and texts included, the scope, and content of the anthology, its organisational strategies, and the literary ideas and models adopted, this paper seeks to answer what is the Chinese literature, both the idea and reality, presented with the Gems. With historical research and contextual analysis, this paper focuses on the power of anthology as a tool for constructing a view of Chinese literature and writing literary history in the larger context of the sinologists’ studies and translation of Chinese literature. Combining together translation studies, Chinese studies, and comparative literature, this paper will enhance our understanding of the history of sinological translation of Chinese literature and knowledge production of Chinese literature through translation.

Ashley Liu, “From Premodern xiaoshuo to Modern Fiction: The Untangling of xiaoshuo and Fiction via Digital Research and a Critical Examination of Lu Xun’s Scholarship on Premodern Fiction in the Context of Sino-Japanese Literary Modernity”

The first modern Chinese study of premodern Chinese fiction is Lu Xun’s A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, a work of fundamental importance in Western and Chinese academia. A major aspect of Lu’s influence on modern scholarship is confounding “fiction” with xiaoshuo 小說, a Classical Chinese term that denotes a wide variety of discourse later appropriated by Lu to translate the Western notion of fiction. I seek to clarify the historical relationship between xiaoshuo and fiction and Lu’s Social Darwinist agenda behind conflating them.
My research on Classical Chinese primary sources relies on performing keyword searches in and collocation analysis on the Chronological Database of Chinese Literature (CDCL), a digital database that contains almost 2,000 titles from the Three Kingdoms period to the Republican era sourced from my scraping of Wikisource and Paul Vierthaler’s digital Siku quanshu collection. All texts in the CDCL are categorized by the dynasty of origin, which enables diachronic computational analysis on an extraordinary scale. Through this, I expand the investigation of premodern understanding of xiaoshuo into massive uncharted territories. I argue that xiaoshuo’s denotation of “fiction” first appeared in the Tang Dynasty but was never the sole meaning before modern history. The equivalence between xiaoshuo and fiction have drawn by Lu Xun and modern scholars are based on a teleological approach characterised by the desire to bridge traditional literature with Western-inspired literary modernity, which is an intellectual legacy of the formative period of modern Sino-Japanese discourse on fiction.

Mingming Liu, “In the Mirror of the Dream: Cao Xueqin, Borges, and Chinese Avant-Garde”

The Garden of Forking Paths is a 1941 detective fiction by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. At the centre of its series of enclosed narratives is a non-unilinear novel that depicts every possible narrative sequence. The philosophical nature of a book that presents the infinite bifurcation in time excites scholars of Borges, but few have realised its connection to Dream of the Red Chamber, an 18th-century Chinese masterpiece by Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹. This paper argues that The Garden of Forking Paths, hidden underneath the façade of popular detective fiction, is actually Borges’s metaphysical interpretation of Dream of the Red Chamber.
Considering the self-acknowledged influence of Borges among Chinese avant-garde writers, this paper further argues that the influence is not one-directional, but forms a circle between the East and the West. Dream of the Red Chamber, through its abridged translations in the early 20th-century, served as a source of inspiration for Borges’s innovative use of mirrors and dreams. It returned to China after 1979 under the newly-coined name—magical realism—and inspired a new generation of writers, such as Yu Hua 余華 and Ge Fei 格非, in their adoption of metafictional techniques and circular narratives. While delineating the connections among Cao Xueqin, Borges, and Chinese avant-garde writers, this paper also attempts to distinguish what each of them has contributed to our literary imagination of realities.

Kar Yue Chan, “Adaptation of Cantonese Opera: From Tradition to Gendered Challenges”

Cantonese opera is a regional form first developed in South China and later on popularised in Hong Kong back in the 1950s to the 1980s. Cross-dressing and the practice of role impersonation has been a long-standing tradition for critical analysis. Audiences often witness cases of opera actresses disguising themselves as male roles: a kind of ‘conflict’ between the real self of an actress and her impersonated identity.
It is never easy to tell whether the operatic roles are being acted by male or female members of a troupe because specific roles could be acted by both genders. Opera-goers also experience gender displacements of such role switching in some opera contents which feature a narrated role ‘crossing over’ the male and female genders. Somehow, a high level of difficulty is encountered when one tries to embark on the trade of translating Cantonese opera scripts, as in such gendered contexts the operatic lyrics possess the follows: formats resembling classical Chinese poetry; cultural elements that subtly penetrate the lines; and the gendered aspects of the acting roles which affect the mood and tone of the scripts.
Particular gender roles are sometimes represented by implicit and explicit lyric forms. The respective translation strategies should be adjusted to a certain degree of intelligibility in order to achieve tasks of revealing the cultural concerns and the delicate differences in gendered tone representations. All of these challenging factors will be discussed in this paper, with reference to some existing translated versions of some Cantonese opera lyrics.

The Southwestern Frontier of Early and Medieval China

Re-envisioning the Dynamics of Empire
Thursday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room 2

Organised by Chun Xu
Jörg Hüsemann, Chair
Chun Xu, “The Collapse of the Imperial Frontier in Yunnan (300–750)”
Alexis Lycas, “The Southwestern Frontier in Tang China: Bureaucracy and Ethnography in the Man shu (Book of the Southern Barbarians)”
Lia Wei, “Highlands Meet History: A Comparative Study of Burial Caves along the Upper Yangzi River at the Fall of the Han Empire”

In the study of early and medieval Chinese peripheries/frontiers, one may identify three major problems: 1) an obsession with dichotomies: Han/barbarians (huayi 華夷), the raw/cooked, or sedentarism/nomadism, which leads to the notion of linear borders (physical, figurative and imaginary alike); 2) a Sinocentric (meta)narrative that adopts models of acculturation; and 3) an over-emphasis on the political and institutional, and geographically on the North and the Northwest. These perspectives often fail to address the place-based evidence of empire-building in the peripheries, and, in particular, the interrelations between ecology, culture and political power. A holistic and decentred approach to early imperial frontiers is necessary to understand the dynamics of empire, and indeed what it means to refer to China as an empire. This panel examines the southwestern frontier of early and medieval China in modern-day Sichuan and Yunnan not as a defensive line (jiao 徼) or simply a “buffer/contact zone” of fuzziness, but as converging and overlapping networks of military posts, administrative centres, information gathering, ecological relations, belief, and ritual systems and ethnolinguistic communities, in which the imperial state was by no means the only or even the major actor. The panel places at the centre of the analysis the role of merchants, local great families, allied chiefs, rice, and cast iron. In doing so, we argue that the establishment, consolidation, and decline of imperial power in the southwestern frontier is often dictated in response to changing circumstances in the networks, rather than simply by political actors.

Chun Xu, “The Collapse of the Imperial Frontier in Yunnan (300–750)”

This paper addresses the local cultural and political dynamics that culminated in the demise of imperial power in Yunnan during the Six Dynasties and gave rise to the Nanzhao-Dali kingdom in the following centuries. It sets out to examine the decline of imperial power from a local perspective, by seeing early imperial Yunnan as an imperial frontier comprising of networks of Han military posts, farming settlements, trade routes, and allied native tribes, with which the Chinese empire projected its power and on which local elites, Han and indigenous alike, capitalised to maintain a socio-political order. The imperial frontier collapsed when 1) trade networks were dismantled and rebuilt by new ecological and economic relations in Yunnan; 2) relocation and concentration of population removed the manpower base for imperial institutions, and, more importantly, 3) local elites started to forge new identities that no longer depended on imperial titulature, among other traditions of the political culture, and started to adopt new ideologies. The paper serves as a reminder of that, in terms of strategy, ideology, and practice, perspectives from the periphery differ substantially from those from the centre and calls for a more integrated approach to the frontiers as a whole in the study of the early Chinese empire.

Alexis Lycas, “The Southwestern Frontier in Tang China: Bureaucracy and Ethnography in the Man shu (Book of the Southern Barbarians)”

My contribution to this panel will address issues of bureaucratic management in the frontier territory through the double lens of historiography and ethnography by focusing on the little-studied Man shu 蠻書, or Book of the barbarians, a ninth-century work by the official Fan Chuo 樊綽. The tumultuous history of Yunnan under the Tang, and the fact that “Man shu” is only one of the retrospective titles attributed to Fan Chuo’s work—alternative titles include Yunnan zhi 雲南志 (Gazetteer of Yunnan) and Yunnan shiji 雲南史記—suggest that this work was as much an ethnographic account of frontier/unruly people as it was a bureaucratic attempt at ordering the information known at the time about a zone that was not politically integrated in the Tang empire. Specifically, I will explore two intertwined directions. First, I will probe whether this ethnographic account could or should be understood as a proxy for an actual administrative and fiscal survey of a frontier territory. Second, this will help assess the importance of this text for the history of geographical knowledge, as it was produced during a period when local writings underwent important changes, from Six Dynasties accounts on local customs and oddities to Song and later local gazetteers.

Lia Wei, “Highlands Meet History: A Comparative Study of Burial Caves along the Upper Yangzi River at the Fall of the Han Empire”

This research is located in the peculiar environment of the upper Yangzi River (Changjiang 長江), under the weakening rule of the Eastern Han dynasty. Cultural exchanges between plain and highlands are addressed through a comparative survey of rock-cut cemeteries along with minor and major southern tributaries of the Yangzi. While most surveyed caves date to the late Han period, this article does not lose sight of the wider phenomenon of cliff burials in South China. Correlations are proposed between burial typologies and the nature of southwards routes, which are crucial for a period that predates detailed accounts of the area in historical sources. This article is part of an effort to refine our understanding of the regional network routes on the Southwest frontier, what we could call a “proto-historical geography”, by avoiding the a priori attribution of burial practices to cultural groups. To the narrative of imperial occupation in the Southwest, this research opposes the consistency in type and the distribution of an alternative type of funerary landscape over a 500km belt south of the Yangzi. The funerary landscape uncovered allows us to further understand locational strategies, riverine routes, and the role of frontier groups.