'We Other Confucians': Rethinking Repression in Book of Songs Studies

Tamara Chin, University of Chicago

          The Shijing (Book of Songs) is celebrated as the beginning of the Chinese poetic tradition of pleasure and passion.  According to most modern scholars, the Han dynasty commentaries aimed to repress, refashion or rectify the poems’ open expressions of desire in keeping with Confucian morality.  This paper argues the need to historicize the notion of Confucian sexual morality used in Shijing studies.  It situates the most controversial Han commentaries in their literary and political context: in particular, the anxiety about the rise of imperial consort families, and the emergence of the female subject in Confucian ethics. 

 

Castration, Remasculinization, and Upward Mobility in The Precious Mirror of Ranked Flowers

Liangyan Ge, University of Notre Dame

          The nineteenth-century novel Precious Mirror for Ranked Flowers (Pinhua baojuan) has been considered as a work of homoeroticism or a transposed courtesan fiction. This paper proposes that the symbolic field in the novel can be more meaningfully perceived as that of castration. While the boy actors for female roles on stage are not castrati in the biological sense, they are victims of a socio-institutional castration that deprives them of the power and right for upward mobility that are supposedly bestowed on all men. Significantly, the eventual improvement of their social status, under the help from their literati lovers/friends, coincides with a gradual process of remasculinization. 

 

Reflections on the Changes and Challenges in Chinese Fiction Studies

Ming Dong Gu, Rhodes College

          Studies of Chinese fiction have made significant advances in historical research, critical practice, and theoretical inquiry. What is notable in the advances is that scholars have gone beyond the traditional approaches to initiate a series of tacit shifts in emphasis. The first noticeable shift is one from a view of fiction as social documents like history that reflects or refracts social reality to a view of fiction as an art produced in particular social settings.  The second shift is one from a view of fiction as mere storytelling to a notion of fiction as a verbal art. The third shift is one from traditional literary approaches predicated on philological, historical, biographical, sociological methods to postmodern approaches informed by a variety of contemporary theories. In the field of modern Chinese fiction, these shifts have largely been completed. In the field of classical Chinese fiction, they are partially completed or are still in their initial stages. These shifts, whether completed or in the initial stage, have posed serious challenges and given us a great deal of food for thought. In a way, they have compelled us to consider whether studies of Chinese fiction are in the process of undergoing a paradigm shift in Thomas Kuhn’s conception. Personally, I think that we are in the process of completing a paradigm shift, which has the promise of pushing fiction study beyond the boundaries of Sinology to be merged with the international and interdisciplinary studies of narrative in the global context. A paradigm change has a great potential for broadening and deepening fiction studies, but it will also bring along challenges and anxieties. My presentation will examine the pros and cons for a paradigm change as well as its accompanying concerns or anxieties and suggests ways to deal with them. I venture to propose a paradigm that integrates traditional and postmodern approaches to prose fiction. I argue that a purely traditional approach or a purely postmodern approach seems to be wanting in one way or another, but a creative integration of both will complement each other and open new avenues to fiction studies.

 

Laughing Matters: On Woodblock Print and Cultural Change in the Late Ming

Yuming He, University of Chicago

          A burgeoning market for woodblock publications, and the accompanying explosion in new publishing genres, left an indelible stamp on late-Ming society. Laughter was one commodity that was marketed and produced with particular effectiveness. This paper examines the specific types of “laughing matter” that appear in late-Ming daily-use encyclopedias and related genres, in hopes of shedding light on the particular cultural space created by the print industry of this period. Compendia of jokes, brothel literature, language games, songs, and illustrations, all drew on a form of cultural memory that emerged in conjunction with the expansion of the woodblock publication industry. Careful attention to such “laughing matter” may not only help us to understand how people of this period amused themselves, but also reveal a historically unique set of attitudes about interpretation and the textual past that was shared by these publications’ first audiences.

 

The Pleasures of Reading Chinese Fiction

Robert E. Hegel, Washington University

          As scholars we may all too often overlook basic questions about the texts we explore, such as why historical readers bothered to devote the great amounts of time needed to read one of the lengthy major novels.  What did they enjoy in them?  Generalizing on a broad range of recent scholarly findings, we can glimpse how the original readers of popular fiction of the Ming and Qing most likely were intended to—and probably did—read and respond to these stories.  One may discern two general kinds of reading, sympathetic and intertextual, emotional and intellectual, as they are stimulated and often frustrated by the masterpieces of those periods.

 

Passion for Friends: Li Zhi’s Tragedy and His Pursuit of Friendship

Martin Huang, University of California, Irvine 

          This paper looks at how the late Ming controversial thinker Li Zhi’s passionate pursuit of friendship foregrounds the tensions within the important Confucian ethic concept of wulun (the five cardinal human relationships) as it was being revalorized during an age when friendship was being celebrated with unprecedented enthusiasm among many literati. If there was indeed a cult of friendship during that time, Li Zhi was one of those who pursued friendship almost with a religious enthusiasm. He gained a lot from friendship and, probably more significantly, he also paid dearly for it. Part of his tragedy may lie in his inability or refusal to fully appreciate the gap between his ideal of friendship and the reality he was confronting.

 

A Stele of Forgetfulness: An Unmemorable Name List at the End of the Phonetic Quest in The Flowers in the Mirror

Ling Hon Lam, University of Chicago

          If good memory is what usually defines gifted intelligence in traditional Chinese literature, why would the one hundred talented women celebrated in The Flowers in the Mirror (Jinhua yuan, 1828) fail to remember even each other’s name? Apparently, in the second half of the novel where the women get together in prolonged parties, even the narrator/author himself has a hard time to present this swamp of characters in a “memorable” way without confusing one with another. Why does the list of names of these one hundred exiled immortals inscribed on a huge jade slab raise such a question of memory, whereas a very similar stele of names in the earlier Water Margins never does? What story does this failure of memory – a frequent failure not only to recall names but to cite canonical sources in a literary game – tell us about the transmuted production of fiction and knowledge in early nineteenth century China? These questions cannot be solved unless we contrast the name list, which thwarts recitation from memory and is thus as silent as the stele itself, with the phonetic chart that looms large in the first half of the novel, which solicits people to fill in its gaps by varied repetition of sound. What confronts us is the vicissitudes of the voice resulting from various forms of transcription and imprint. These vicissitudes, curiously, are then mapped out in terms of gender and topography, embodied by the father’s phonetic quest overseas and the daughter’s drinking parties in the imperial capital of the only Female Emperor in Chinese history.

 

Transmutations of Desire: Drama and Narrative in Late Imperial China

Qiancheng Li, Louisiana State University

          The paper aims to study the Buddhist impact on the discourse about qing (desire) as manifested in narrative works, in vernacular as well as in literary Chinese, and drama from late Ming through the Qianlong period and Honglou meng.  The writers in question, when representing qing, tend to juxtapose two extremes in one work, namely human desire and its renunciation or transcendence, with the result that both ends of the spectrum are intensified and enhanced.  This phenomenon is arguably one of the defining features of the literature dealing with desire in China.

 

Feminine Diction and Male Literary Communities during the Ming-Qing Transition

Wai-yee Li, Harvard University

          This essay will discuss how the early Qing literati use female personae and the feminine diction of longing to debate political choices, allegorize national destiny, and remember late-Ming culture.  My focus will be on how the ambiguities involved affect literary communication (in, for example, poetic exchanges) and forge literary communities.

 

The Development of British Sinology and Changes in Translation Practice: The Case of Sir John Francis Davis (1795-1890)

James St. André, University of Manchester

          Lawrence Venuti has cogently argued that translation is a force that effects both the formation of domestic culture and the representation of a foreign one.  In this paper I will outline what I see as broad developments and trends in translations from Chinese into English between 1810 and 1840, which I will tie in with changes in how knowledge of China was incorporated into society as a whole.  This in turn is related to the establishment of Sinology as a profession (including the development of specialized journals), the quarrel in France between the “fleuristes” and “anti-fleuristes” in the 1820s, and ongoing debates regarding the translation of Greek and Latin classics as reflected in book reviews in critical journals.  Basically, several changes occur more or less simultaneously over this period, with no clear order of precedence; rather, they represent a sea-change in attitude toward China.   These changes in turn fostered the type of attitude among the British public that helped make the opium war possible and put an end to the oriental renaissance described by Raymond Schwab in his Renaissance Orientale (1950).  The focus of this paper will be on how these changes are both reflected in and partially effected by translation practice, specifically, the work of Sir John Francis Davis, who was the most important of the first-generation translators working for the East India Company in Canton at this time.  I will argue that Davis is representative of a tendency to “split” translation practice into “literal” translations in academic journals, which established the inferiority of Chinese culture, and “smooth” translations in the general press, which protected British culture from being infected by the inferior Chinese culture that they themselves constituted through their literal translations.

 

Fiction as Hagiography, Mission by Means of Literary Production

Richard G. Wang, University of Florida

          The paper will examine the activities of the late Ming publisher and novelist Yang Erzeng (fl. 1601-1623).  Yang Erzeng was an author of two extant novels, and responsible for the printing of a collection of classical tales.  Inheriting a family tradition of publishing business, he was quite active in Hangzhou, one of the publishing centers of the late Ming, and pubished many books covering works of philosohy, histories, belles lettres, fiction, religion, painting manuals, medicine, and travel books, all of which were hot topics of the time.  At the same time, he was a devout Daoist follower, compiling and printing two important Daoist hagiographies and an “armchair traveller’s” collection of maps and illustrations of mountains, including holy mountains and temples, and was also responsible for publishing another Daoist work.  In his career, his printing of the religious texts and religious fiction is very different from his other projects.  For the religious works and religious fiction, he handled them very carefully, with conscious collation, and first-rate illustrations, making the quality of these works high, among the best examples of Ming prints.  In terms of the contents and styles of these works, they also surpass most similar works printed by others, making them the masterpieces in their own categories.  By investigating Yang Erzeng’s life, studying textual issues, and analyzing these works per se, I argue that because Yang Erzeng treated fiction as hagiography, he wrote it very seriously, intending to spread the Daoist teachings.  Meanwhile, as a writer and, more importantly, as an experienced publisher, he knew how to appeal to the market for his religious works.  Even in his mission of composing and printing religious works, he exhausted all means to amuse his readers, making the religious texts more like stoties and art works.  This paper will further pursue Yang Erzeng in a larger cultural context of the late Ming, presenting his case as an example of the common phenomenon and practice among the publishers/novelists who had strong religious consciousness.

 

Nineteenth-Century Translations of Chinese Poetry into French

Pauline Yu, ACLS, Columbia University

          I will discuss the history of Judith Gautier's 1867 Le Livre de Jade, one of the earliest volumes of translations from Chinese poetry published in any European language.  I'll explore the connections between her interest in this project, undertaken as an amateur student of Chinese, and both the sinological context and the influence of the world of French letters, in which Judith Gautier's father Théophile played a central role.  The collection's remarkable literary and musical afterlife provides an illuminating insight into the cultural history of translation, mistranslation, and adaptation.

 

Song-within-Song and Play-within-Play in Seventeenth-Century Drama

Judith T. Zeitlin, University of Chicago

          The staging of a play within a play is one of the most common self-referential devices in theater the world over. In musical theater traditions, it is also common to incorporate literal instances of vocal performances into the dramatic fabric of the action—what musicologist Carolyn Abbate calls “phenomenal song.” Like the play within a play, phenomenal song takes us into a self-conscious realm where theater comments upon the nature of its most basic processes through the very processes by which performers perform.  Given the importance of theater and theatricality in late imperial Chinese literary and cultural life, and given the centrality of vocal music in all forms of traditional Chinese drama, it is not surprising that the long chuanqi playtexts of this period are rich in reflexive scenes of both sorts, the play within a play, and the song within a song.

          This paper will examine metatheatrical scenes in a range of chuanqi plays from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.  Such metatheatrical scenes stage a kind of internal commentary that both offers guidelines for interpreting the drama and for destabilizing the dramatic illusion presented. Having one role type play a different role type, thereby exposing the artifice of the role type system through the misfit between character and role is one important strategy. Staging a singing lesson is another common stratagem. Here the possibilities for irony are perhaps even greater, since the emphasis on learning a technical craft not only undermines the meaning of the lyrics the performer sings, but the affective power of the voice to transport the listener.

 

Tan-chun’s Garden: Sentiment, Household Management and Family Decline in Dream of the Red Chamber

Yiqun Zhou, Valparaiso University

          Setting in center stage Tan-chun rather than Bao-yu, this paper intends to tease out a significant alternative perception that Dream yields on two of its major themes: family fortune and the cult of qing (sentiment, emotion, love, desire, and attachment). While Tan-chun shares much with Bao-yu in aesthetic tastes and in the pursuit of a life of sentiment, the brother and sister differ fundamentally in their attitudes toward the family, from its basic values to its members’ duty to contribute to its well-being. Through an astute manipulation of the affinity and divergence between the two characters throughout the novel, the narrator intimates an alternative perspective on the family order that spells restriction and suppression for Bao-yu. While Bao-yu exemplifies a radical clash between sentiment, individuality, and freedom on the one hand and ritual, hierarchy and responsibility on the other hand, which is resolved only by a complete disenchantment leading to the life of a monk, Tan-chun seems to stand for a tantalizing compatibility between the two sets of values.