Event category: Premodern Literature

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.

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.

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.

Establishing Cross-Referential Patterns through Parallelism in Premodern Chinese Prose Texts
Tuesday
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
Room D

• Organised by Lisa Indraccolo
• Chaired by Matthias Richter
• Lisa Indraccolo, “Two Handles to Rule Them All—A Structural Analysis of Hánfēizǐ ‘Èr bǐng’ 韓非子 · 二柄”
• Wolfgang Behr, “Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change—Traces of Morphological Parallelism in Pre-Qin Prose”
• Joachim Gentz, “Creating Complex Lines of Conceptual Argumentation Through Parallelisms in the Xunzi and the Zhuangzi”
• Valérie Lavoix, “Carving Argumentation in Paired Dragons: Representations and Effects of Parallelism in The Wénxīn Diāolóng 文心雕龍 (ca 500 AD)”

“Parallelismus membrorum”, a term coined by Lowth (1778), has long been acknowledged as a pervasive feature of Classical Chinese literature (Gentz 2007), which is widely employed in different genres across the ages beyond the rich landscape of poetry. Its use is especially prominent in Chinese “Kunstprosa” (Behr & Gentz 2005) and post-Qin “parallel prose” (piántǐwén 駢體文). Parallelism in Classical Chinese poetry has been extensively studied, while less attention has been paid to its role in prose texts or to its description in indigenous meta-discourses so far. Like in many other literary traditions, patterns of phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, or higher textual levels of recurrence, structural parallelism can be harnessed “strategically” to enhance argumentative force (Meyer 2011). In particular, parallelism assumes two closely interconnected functions: (a) it organises arguments following a deliberate conceptual design, according to specific internal organizational principles; (b) it establishes meaningful inter-and intra-textual cross-references within different sections of a text, or across chapters of a more extensive work, operating via a combination of cognitive facilitation, expectation subversion and emotional intensification (Menninghaus et al. 2017). The proposed panel, chaired by Matthias Richter (University of Colorado, Boulder), studies different types of parallelism (semantic, grammatical, phonological) through the analysis of pertinent case studies drawn from different kinds of Early and Medieval Chinese prose texts. It aims at providing new insights into the study of different forms of parallelism in premodern Chinese literature, promoting an integrated reading of classical texts that takes both their structure and content into consideration.

Lisa Indraccolo, “Two Handles to Rule Them All—A Structural Analysis of Hánfēizǐ ‘Èr bǐng’ 韓非子 · 二柄”

The “two handles” (èr bǐng 二柄)–‘punishments’ (刑 xíng) and ‘rewards’ (德 dé), are one of the core concepts and main government techniques of legalistic thought. They are explicitly acknowledged as the primary “tools” through which the ruler leads and controls his ministers (Pines, Goldin & Kern 2015). Through the promotion of law-abiding, obedient subordinates and the implacable punishment and purge of the neglectful, insubordinate ones, the ruler strengthens his grip on his entourage, thereby ensuring that the state is orderly run (Witzel 2012). The employment of such technique is discussed in detail in the corresponding chapter of the Hánfēizǐ 韓非子 (Graziani 2015). This deceptively simple, short chapter is actually a carefully constructed piece, both from the rhetorical and structural point of view, two aspects that are closely intertwined in early Chinese literature (Behr & Gentz 2005; Gentz & Meyer 2015). This paper studies the internal structure and the organization of arguments in the chapter ‘Èr bǐng’, with particular attention paid to the “strategic” use of parallelism and other rhetorical and literary devices, such as transition terms and historical examples. The aim is to show how such structural and rhetorical elements not only harmoniously complement each other but are also a constitutive component of the text that cannot be overlooked without comprising its hermeneutics, as they are deliberately distributed and arranged so as to support the development of the argument, enhancing argumentative force and highlighting and drawing attention to the most critical issues at stake.

Wolfgang Behr, “Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change—Traces of Morphological Parallelism in Pre-Qin Prose”

Rhetorical properties of equivalence relations between sounds, sentence positions and lexical semantics in Chinese prose have been widely commented upon, aesthetically evaluated and didactically proscribed since the Han period (Yú Jǐngxiáng 2002, Shigehara 2014). The European study of Biblical Hebrew parallelism started with de Rossi (c. 1511–1578), received its canonical “tripartite” formulation by Lowth (1753, 1778) and is compared to Tang poetry in Davis (1830). Morphological parallelism, however, has remained largely unexplored since Schlegel’s “La loi” of 1896. This seems odd, considering the importance assigned to morphosyntactic parallelism and its “stereoscopic” effects in Chinese (Boodberg 1954) from Jakobson (1960, 1966) up to their recent rediscoveries as neural substrates in “empirical aesthetics” of European literature (Menninghaus’ group 2014–, tinyurl.com/rbo4ujr). It is due to the failure of sinologists, in and outside China, to recognize that Old Chinese, like other Trans-Himalayan languages, shows vestiges of derivational morphology. Like any other linguistic form, morphology is imbued with rhetorical force when sign-sign parallelisms are projected onto sign-meaning relationships. I will explore phenomena where iteration of affixal morphology in six-vowel systems of Old Chinese (Sagart 1999, Jin Lixin 2006, Schuessler 2007, Baxter & Sagart 2014) structures arguments and constructs intra-textual coherence in Warring States texts, aiming to show (a) how morphological parallelisms intersect with devices such as paronomasia, figura etymologica and constituent iconicity on a formal level and (b) how they promote different types of semantic oppositions (Chmielewski 1964), arguments (Gentz 2007) and textual structures (Spirin 1969, 1976).

Joachim Gentz, “Creating Complex Lines of Conceptual Argumentation Through Parallelisms in the Xunzi and the Zhuangzi”

While Chinese and Japanese scholars such as Liu Xie 劉勰 (465–522 CE) and Kūkai 空海 (774–835) have started to classify up to 29 different forms of parallelisms in Chinese texts 1500 years ago, European studies on parallelism and its different forms only started in the 18th century. And while Europeans have been aware of parallelism in (especially poetic) Chinese texts at least since 1830, little attention has been paid to the argumentative function of parallelisms in Chinese prose. In a short introduction, this paper will first point out a few stages of the early history of argumentative parallelism in Chinese texts starting from the formulaic rhetoric of contrasts in early Shangshu and Shijing texts, proceeding to discuss parallelisms as descriptive indicators of orders of classification in texts arranged according to catalogues such as the Hongfan chapter, numerous chapters in the Yi Zhoushu, the Xici zhuan as well as some excavated texts and finally looking at further developments of parallelist argumentation in the Masters’ literature. The main analytical focus of the paper will be devoted to the texts in the Zhuangzi and the Xunzi that start to play with the parallel form to create new and more sophisticated forms of argumentation. Among these, I will be particularly interested in the way parallelisms are used in both texts to introduce and define new conceptual terms in lines of argumentations and thereby serve to build up and structure arguments by means of complex analytical terminology.

Valérie Lavoix, “Carving Argumentation in Paired Dragons: Representations and Effects of Parallelism in The Wénxīn Diāolóng 文心雕龍 (ca 500 AD)”

As a book-length masterpiece of parallel prose (piántǐwén 駢體文) composed in the times of its full blossoming, by a literary critic advocating for literary talent to be a major criterion in the course of official carriers, the Wénxīn diāolóng 文心雕龍 (Dragon carvings on the core of literature, ca. 500 AD) may stand as a rare instance of integrated theory and practice. One of its fifty chapters being devoted to “Parallel phrasing” (Lìcí 麗辭 XXXV), distinguishes sponte sua, a fortiori and appropriate though occasional instances of pairing and parallelism in early texts, before defining the rise of (artistic) parallel phrasing under the Han in terms of “intensified ornamentation” and “distinguished euphony”. Liú Xié’s 劉勰 (ca 465–521) rather straightforward taxonomy of parallelisms emphasises referential types (be they contrastive or converging). To which extent and profit may his normative views be confronted to his own practice throughout the Wénxīn diāolóng? My paper will propose limited and tentative answers to this self-imposing question and will argue that, far from being reducible to a “discourse machine” leading to inconsistencies (Owen, 2001), the effects generated by textual structures—alternation between parallel and separate phrases, parallel variations in enumerative catalogues, taxonomies or hierarchies—do enhance the internal and implicit logics of Liú Xié’s argumentative and demonstrative discourse, which actually lie between its very lines and inter-textual references.

Emotions
Tuesday
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Room D

• Chaired by Angelika Messner
• Marcin Jacoby, “The Subtle Power of the Narrative: Strategies of Persuasion in the Lüshi chunqiu”
• Chi-Chu Ho, “Express the Self-Emotions under the Illness Description from Li Shangyin”
• Tianjun Chen, “Survival, Tradition, Emotion—Exploring the Yuan Literati Group through the Story of Shuangjian and Suqing”
• Giovanna Tsz Wing Wu, “Ending with the Disillusionment of Love: The Philosophy of Life in Tang Xianzu’s Eight-legged Essay and the Virtual Lives in The Legend of Purple Flute”

Marcin Jacoby, “The Subtle Power of the Narrative: Strategies of Persuasion in the Lüshi chunqiu”

Lüshi chunqiu (LSCQ) is a fascinating text bringing together various concepts of political leadership of the Warring States Period, which has only recently attracted more interest of Western scholars. The proposed paper concentrates on the analysis of persuasion strategies employed by the authors of the LSCQ from the point of view of literature studies. Different sections of the LSCQ in the “Views” and “Commentaries” parts are composed typically of a brief topic presentation, several historical exemplae and two to three narratives, mostly historical anecdotes, which illustrate the point presented in section title and the opening topic presentation. These anecdotes are used as tools of persuasion, in a very similar way as various narratives (anecdotes, parables, and fables) in the Zhuangzi, Han Feizi, or the Zhanguo ce. I argue that these historical anecdotes are often employed in the LSCQ as tools of indirect persuasion, and in this allegorical function can be compared to the use of parables in the Zhuangzi, a topic much better researched by scholars in China and in the West. Basing on the analysis of the LSCQ, I propose to depart from the understanding of the narrative in the Warring States Period literature in its anecdotal function, and concentrate on its persuasive, and often allegorical function instead.

Tianjun Chen, “Survival, Tradition, Emotion—Exploring the Yuan Literati Group through the Story of Shuangjian and Suqing”

This paper explores the Yuan literati group through analyzing their reception of Shuangjian and Suqing’s story as a stored allusion and a part of dramatic repertoire. The story has no stable version and the variation is built in the Yuan literati writers’ different way of narrating, appropriating and interpreting it. I will restore the major narrative systems of it, and analyze why literati writers choose one over another. Moreover, it is usually categorized into scholar-courtesan romance. Different from the traditional scholarship that described scholar-courtesan-merchant complex as a response to the uprising monetary power, I bring it back to shi bu yu (Scholar’s frustration) trope in poetic tradition. Some writers’ inherited the representation of poetic shi bu yu; yet others appropriated the tradition to incorporate with the contemporary aesthetic taste. By outlining the writers’ approach to the story, I explore their attitude towards qing (affection) and yu (desire). Neo-Confucianism of Song dynasty, represented by Zhu Xi, derogated qing and yu. They insisted that qing should be controlled and yu should be repressed. But in Shuangjian and Suqing’s case, the yu combined with qing and the qing based on yu are valorised to possess therapeutic function in the Yuan, which is a distinctive response to the Neo-Confucianism opinion. Through a historical, text-based, and evident study on the story, my paper presents the Yuan literati group in the aspects of moral and aesthetic belief, as well their relation to the past, particularly their association with the literary and philosophical tradition.

Chi-Chu Ho, “Express the Self-Emotions under the Illness Description from Li Shangyin”

Being sick is a good way of dissimulation in both career and literature. Li Shangyin (812–858) hid the true name and symptom of illness but revealed scholars image of the loneliness and solitary fortitude of emotions in his writings of illness. Li is one of the most famous poet in the History of Emotions in China, due to he is a representative of Tang Dynasty Literature with excellent writing strategies and graceful lyric poems to indicate the true self-emotions.
The characteristics of writing of illness, which are self-emotion expression and ambiguity language, have been found in the illness poems of Li Shangyin. The real emotions of illness in his poems are all meaningful arrangements to reveal the real scenes of life for readers. As comparison with Susan Sontag, the author of Illness as Metaphor AIDS and its Metaphors, she considered the illness was polluted by metaphors. Therefore, getting rid of the illness metaphors, which contains varieties of dark side facts of the society, is necessary. In contrast, the Chinese poets desired to adopt the allusions and metaphors to conceal with real illness. Li created the model of self-presentation to reveal the true emotions in euphemism by using the patient identity and the ambiguity of illness language. Especially, Li indicated the allusions from “Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 got Dispersion-Thirst illness” and Liu Jhen 劉楨 sickly lay” to present how he bear the suffering procedure of his career.

Giovanna Tsz Wing Wu, “Ending with the Disillusionment of Love: The Philosophy of Life in Tang Xianzu’s Eight-legged Essay and the Virtual Lives in The Legend of Purple Flute”

Tang Xianzu’s eight-legged essays and chuanqi operas are two essentials for studying his thoughts, yet the value of his essays has long been underestimated. “To speak for the sages” is the aim of composing eight-legged essays. Tang was trained as an essayist since his early years, so he became used to thinking in the way of Confucian sages. To fill the loopholes in former Confucian philosophers’ interpretations, Tang often introduced Buddhist and Daoist thoughts into his eight-legged essays. Dialogues between different thoughts provided him with chances to expound upon his philosophy of life. Tang’s contemporaries often criticized that the thoughts embedded in his eight-legged essays were not pure. These criticisms, based on the Cheng-Zhu school, reveal that Tang’s thoughts contradicted the Confucian orthodoxy. On top of this, do these criticisms inspire today’s study of Tang? Eight-legged essays have spotlighted the path through the world of Tang’s early thoughts. If the writing of the eight-legged essay provided Tang with space to re-think the meaning of life, then the chuanqi opera should be considered the field in which he put his thoughts into practice. This paper will focus on Tang’s eight-legged essays and his first opera, The Legend of Purple Flute. By comparing the rational thinking found in his eight-legged essays to the sentimental “practices” found in his opera, this paper re-interprets Tang’s thought during his early years and re-accounts for the value of The Legend of Purple Flute.