Jiayi Chen

jchen
Cohort Year: 2016
Research Interests: Early Modern China
Education: BA: Fudan University, 2014 MA: The University of Chicago, 2015

Biography

My dissertation studies the interplay between games and literature in China from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In particular, I examine the moments when reading becomes a game, and games as topos of literary imaginations in short stories, novels, and plays inform the modes of “participatory readership” in the late Ming and early Qing. Situating myself at the crossings of literary studies, game studies, and visual/material culture studies, I trace how and why important authors turn their literary works into a “playable medium” by engaging the readers to interact with the textual worlds cognitively, affectively, and socially. In so doing, I hope to show how the multifarious intersects between reading practices and literary innovations through the lens of games could shed new light on the graphic, media, and intellectual landscape in early modern China.

Besides, I hold broad interests in the history of books, practices and representations of storytelling, Chinese theater, and Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges.