China Humanities Seminar
China Humanities Seminar – Huaben and the Mind
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Tina Lu, Yale University As a genre, huaben are relentlessly experimental. Sometimes these stories come close to stream of consciousness (especially in their depiction of dreams), and it is easy to lapse into habits of reading that consider those experiments proto-modernist. Tina Lu would like to take a step back and consider the ways […]
David Palmer & Elijah Siegler – Enchanting Huashan in the Global Spiritual Circuit: Intersecting Modes of Making Sacred Space
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeakers: David Palmer, University of Hong Kong Elijah Siegler, College of Charleston This talk is based on the newly released book Dream Trippers (University of Chicago Press), a multi-sited ethnographic study of […]
CANCELED: Jing Tsu – Key Strokes: What Made the Chinese Script Revolution?
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Jing Tsu, Yale University It is tempting to understand the Chinese script revolution of the modern era as part of a familiar narrative of vengeance. The Chinese language was idealized then disparaged by the Europeans, on this view, banished then revived only to play a mere prop in different fantasies about the Orient. That Chinese […]
Paul W. Kroll – Personal Moments in Medieval Chinese Poetry
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Paul W. Kroll, University of Colorado Medieval Chinese poetry, like most self-consciously traditional literature, embraces learning, presumption, and intertextuality with ardor. Scholarship delights to roam in these fields which provide rich fare for the mind. But those moments that suddenly engage the heart (a somewhat neglected organ in the postmodern era) affect us at […]
Eric Greene – Repentance in the Formation of Chinese Buddhism
Speaker: Eric Greene, Yale University The ritual activity that in China was known as chanhui 懺悔 – often understood to mean “confession” or “repentance” – was without doubt one the central forms of Buddhist practice in medieval China. Despite this, scholars have often disagreed concerning, firstly, what “repentance” even means in the Chinese or Buddhist contexts, as […]
Evelyn (Chiung-yun) Liu – When Fantastic Narrative Encounters Empirical Knowledge: Imagining the World in “The Eunuch Sanbao’s Voyage to the Western Ocean”
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Evelyn (Chiung-yun) Liu, Academia Sinica, HYI Visiting Scholar The Eunuch Sanbao's Voyage to the Western Ocean, a late-sixteenth century novel loosely based on the historical expeditions commanded by Zheng He (1371-1433), is a peculiar mixture of factual accounts of foreign lands and fantastic narrative. In this work, popular Buddhist and Daoist figures living in a […]
Jing Tsu – Thinking Small in the Literary Cosmos
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Jing Tsu, Yale University More than ten years after Sinophone studies, is it breaking up? This talk begins with a recent skirmish over the fraught term and its export. In the attempt to bring faraway and neglected kins into its fold, Sinophone studies is facing open resistance where writers are choosing not to belong or subscribe. Yet, this talk suggests, […]
Amelia Ying Qin – Seeking Patterns: Close and Distant Readings of Two Collections of Tang 唐 (618-907) Dynasty Anecdotes
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Amelia Ying Qin, An Wang Post Doctoral Fellow, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies This study takes two different approaches—close and distant readings—to the hidden patterns in two anecdote collections. The Songchuang zalu 松牕雜錄 (Miscellaneous Notes under the Pine Window) is a small Tang 唐 (618-907) collection of sixteen anecdotes that claims its accounts are both “particularly […]
Wen-Yi Huang – Families Divided: Migration and Those Left Behind in Fifth- and Sixth-Century China
Speaker: Wen-Yi Huang, An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellow, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University In this talk I explore the impact of migration on family members left behind, particularly those whose parents, children, siblings, and spouses were forcibly moved to the Northern Wei (386-534 CE) from four successive southern states of Eastern Jin (317-420 CE), Liu-Song (420-479 […]
Alex des Forges – The Examined Subject and the Natural Self in the Eight-Legged Essay
Speaker: Alex des Forges, University of Massachusetts - Boston This paper inquires into the rhetoric and practice of the individual voice in Ming dynasty examination essays, commonly referred to as shiwen (modern prose) or bagu wen (eight-legged essays). Beginning in the early 1500s, essay criticism and the essays themselves feature a rhetoric of the natural […]
郝春文 Hao Chunwen – 敦煌寫本齋文的分類、定名及其文本結構 Rethinking the Structure and Typology of Liturgical Texts From Dunhuang
This talk will be given in Mandarin Speaker: Hao Chunwen 郝春文, Senior Professor, Capital Normal University This talk gives an overview of recent scholarly thinking on the typology and structure of the liturgical texts found among the Dunhuang manuscripts. We can divide the thousands of liturgical texts found at Dunhuang into two main categories: liturgical protocols […]
Andrew Chittick – The Resistant South: Sketching a History of the Wu People in the First Millennium CE
Speaker: Andrew Chittick, Eckerd College The history of East Asia in the first millennium CE is ordinarily framed as the successive “fragmentation” of China under the Han dynasty, and its “reunification” under the Sui and Tang dynasties. This talk develops an alternative perspective, in which mainland East Asia is characterized by many distinct cultural regions, which […]