The purpose of this conference is to honor Anthony Yu’s extraordinary achievements as a scholar and as a teacher across the humanities at The University of Chicago in the wake of his recent retirement. We are gathering a group of his students, friends, and colleagues in Chinese and Comparative Literature whose work has been influenced by his scholarship in various areas.  The conference aims to explore the idea of “pleasure and passion in Chinese literature” from the perspectives of cultural history, religion, gender dynamics, textual production, translation, and trends in the study of fiction. The breadth and interdisciplinary nature of the papers in turn testify to Professor Yu’s wide-ranging accomplishments that cross cultural, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries.

          Professor Yu has written incisively on the relationship between Confucian thought and the mechanism of authoritarian control. More broadly, he has reflected on the ability of Chinese culture to examine its own legacy.  The first panel, “Moments of Cultural Re-definition,” addresses significant moments of self-questioning in late-imperial cultural history. Martin Huang will discuss Li Zhi, a late-Ming cultural icon widely hailed for the iconoclastic originality of his thought or mourned as the tragic embodiment of the contradictions of his era. By focusing on Li Zhi’s views of friendship and kinship, Huang will propose a new perspective on late-Ming cultural trends.  Wai-yee Li will discuss how the literati of the early Qing period use female personae and the feminine diction of longing to debate political choices, allegorize national destiny, and remember late-Ming culture. Judith Zeitlin will explore the cultural ramifications of the convention of a play-within-a play as a mirror into the heightened self-consciousness and reflexivity of the era. 

          One of Professor Yu’s current areas of research is late-imperial women’s literature, specifically the nineteenth century poet Wu Zao. The second panel will deal with gender and power. Tamara Chin argues that sexual morality in Han commentaries on the Shijing (Book of Songs) should be interpreted in the context of contemporary philosophical and political preoccupation with gender. Liangyan Ge uses the trope of castration and disempowerment to read a nineteenth-century novel on the romantic relationships between elite men and male opera singers. Yiqun Zhou will show how romantic sensibility and practical competence are reconciled, and the implications of such reconciliation for female agency and domestic politics in the great eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber.

          Professor Yu is perhaps best-known for his monumental five-volume translation of The Journey to the West, which he is currently compressing into a new one-volume edition to be published by The University of Chicago Press. The third panel will therefore be devoted to issues of translation and scholarly trends in the study of Chinese fiction. In the panel, Mingdong Gu’s paper will explore the notion of paradigm shifts in the study of Chinese fiction. The other speakers on this panel will excavate the early history of nineteenth-century translations of Chinese literature into European languages. James St. André will examine English translations of Chinese novels done by Sir John Francis Davis while working for the East India Company in Canton. Pauline Yu will focus on Judith Gautier’s translations of Chinese poetry within the context of French sinology circles and the literary scene of the 1860s.

          The fourth panel, “The Pleasures and Dangers of Reading,” will turn to textual production and reading as a cultural practice.  Robert Hegel will discuss the late-imperial reader’s horizons of expectations. Yuming He will take up the contextualization of disparate materials, especially “laughing matter,” in late-Ming daily use encyclopedias. Ling Hon Lam will consider the question of reading in meta-textual terms, using as example acts of reading, intoning, and forgetting in the nineteenth century novel The Flowers in the Mirror. As it happens, the question of how Dream of the Red Chamber reads the tradition and itself, and how it has been read in turn, are the central concerns of Professor Yu’s study, Rereading the Stone.

          Another important area of Professor Yu’s research and teaching is the history of religions, as evinced by his recent book, State and Religion in China. His writings on Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber have deepened our understanding of Daoist and Buddhist perspectives in those novels.  Our last panel will therefore address the relationship between literature and religion. Richard G. Wang and Qiancheng Li, drawing their examples from classical and vernacular narrative, as well as drama, will focus on Daoism and Buddhism, respectively.

          Above all, Tony is a master of intellectual argument and of language in all its rhetorical and literary splendor. It is fitting therefore that we end with a roundtable that brings together four of the most eminent scholars and translators of Chinese fiction: David Roy, Andrew Plaks, Robert Hegel, and Tony himself, to discuss the new challenges facing this field in the twenty-first century. 

Co-organized by Judith T. Zeitlin (University of Chicago) and Wai-yee Li (Harvard University)

Sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Humanities Division, the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations, and the Department of Comparative Literature