New Course
“The Art of Chinese Poetry”
This course introduces students to the rich tradition of premodern Chinese poetry and poetics. We will learn the art of reading poetry, theories on poetic composition and criticism in Chinese literary tradition, and receptions of classical Chinese poetry and poetics in a global context. Our survey starts with The Odes in the first millennium BCE and ends at China’s last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), when literati found traditional poetic forms and language insufficient to describe their encounters with the modern world. The course will take a chronological approach, covering famous poets including Tao Qian, Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, and Su Shi; within the chronology, each class will focus on a specific theme, such as poetry and ritual, poetry and translation, or poetry and the everyday. The last one-third of the course will be devoted to discussions of non-Chinese readers’ (for example, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley, I. A. Richards, and William Empson) interpretations and appropriations of Chinese poetics in the 20th century when the East became a profession and the subject of academic enquiry for poets and scholars from Europe and America. Are there “epics” in Chinese poetic tradition? Is Chinese poetry non-mimetic? Is there an aesthetic or ethnic “essence” in Chinese poetry that will be misinterpreted, if not erased, during translation? Investigating the questions posed by these modern readers—their assumptions and implications—will generate fruitful discussions on issues important in fields of comparative literature, world literature, and Sinophone studies, such as “Chineseness,” “comparison” as a methodology, and application of western critical theories on non-western texts. No background in Chinese language or literature is required. Readings consist of both primary texts in English translation and secondary critical works.
New Course
“Global Medieval Literature”
The terms “medieval” and “Middle Ages” were first coined to refer to the period in European history between the fall of the Western Roman Empire (fifth century CE) and the Renaissance (fifteenth century CE). Regarding geography, the “medieval” has also customarily been associated with Western Europe. The recent global turn in medieval studies, however, asks us to reflect on the usage, implication, and politics of the “Middle Ages.” Can we use “medieval” to describe non-western cultures? What about the periods in other cultural traditions that share similarities with the European Middle Ages in terms of social, religious, and political structures? What more can we learn about each culture when we juxtapose and compare medieval materials on similar topics from different cultural traditions? This course introduces students to the masterpieces in medieval literature and explores the implication of the “global Middle Ages” through cross-cultural comparisons. We will read famous medieval literary works ranging from religious autobiography to Hebrew lyric, from Troubadour poetry to Japanese fiction, from tales of knights to the “secret” history of Byzantium. Some of the topics include: How did medieval writers fashion “self” and “others” in different literary genres? How was gender dynamic represented in medieval literature? How was violence conceptualized, celebrated, and tamed? How did travelers represent their encounters with other cultures?
New Course
“Asian Humanities Seminar”
This class will introduce students to some of the most artistically significant, historically influential, and culturally celebrated works from a number of Asian traditions (China, India, Japan, and Korea). We will consider texts from a wide variety of genres, including epic and lyric poetry, mytho-historical chronicles, court fiction, memoirs, travelogues, sutras, tales of miracle, philosophical treatises, and dramatic literature. The readings span almost three thousand years, from the first millennium BCE to the nineteenth century, and they are selected because they have been recognized as classics within each of their own cultural tradition and even world-wide. Students are encouraged to directly engage with these major texts, reflect meaningfully about them in their own terms, and examine how they can still be inspiring and relevant for us today. Some of the issues that we will explore through these texts include self and community, truth(s) and competing narratives, the everyday, the afterlife, trauma and writing trauma, and modes of modernity. One of the aims of this course is to develop students’ understanding of the diversity of the world and their critical thinking skills and to explore how human beings encounter space, time, faith, change (sometimes traumatic), and representation in an interconnected and now globalized world.
Summer Reading Group
“Thinking Through China/Chineseness in Film and Literature”
The pandemic and concomitant biotechnological competitions have strained the already fragile US-China relation. The rising hostility between the two nations has promoted many to claim that a new Cold War is dawning upon us. A binary mode of thinking is prevalent in both countries, which is often couched in sentences such as A can never be B; A will never understand B; A and B are enemies. The US and China thus represent the opposite ends of a political, cultural, and ideological spectrum: socialism/capitalism, authoritarian/democratic, collective/individualistic, east/west, and so on. This Cold War pattern of thinking is unproductive and dangerous as it reinforces stereotyping and prevents an empathetic understanding of those who are different from us. How can we understand China and its cultural complexity beyond the image of unchanging, inscrutable “East”? How do Chinese people come to terms with their nation and national past? How does the broader sinophone world consider China as a political and cultural entity? And finally, what is, then, China?
With these questions in mind, we will use the summer to close read and discuss some of the most celebrated fictions and films from both China and larger sinophone community in which authors and directors poignantly negotiate with the increasingly globalized world and their cultural heritage. Starting from specific texts, we will also venture to answer some of the larger questions. For example, why is science fiction popular in China? What’s going on between China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong? Who is Confucius, and why is he significant? How did China become modern? The literary and cinematic texts hardly give any definitive conclusions, but invite us readers to participate in the discussion and offer our interpretations.
Detainees and Letters to Request Release in Early Medieval China
Workshop on Migration in Early Medieval China
Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts), May, 2019
Upcoming Workshop Presentation
The Emperor’s New “Stories”: Telling “Truth” and Writing History in Early Medieval China
Brandeis University, Jan 17, 2019
Upcoming Talk
“Masterpieces in Modern Chinese Literature”
Course Description
“To modernize the Chinese people, it has to start from the modernization of the genre ‘novel’.” Liang Qichao, the famous Chinese intellectual in the early twentieth century, envisioned a collapsing China to be salvaged by, first, its modernized literature. Indeed, throughout China’s long century of struggle, exploration, and transformation, literature has been playing a crucial role in negotiating (the consequence of) modernity, fueling revolution, investigating human interiority, constructing national identity, and coping with trauma and diaspora. This course introduces students to the masterpieces in modern Chinese literature and their representations of critical events in twentieth-century Chinese history. In this course, we will focus on the genre “novel” and pay close attention to the language and literary devices that the authors use for storytelling, characterization, and self-representation. The class is organized by themes, such as, for example, modernity, revolution, diaspora, root-seeking, trauma, science fiction and so on. Through class discussions, writing assignments, and oral presentation on the final project, this course will further develop students’ language proficiency, especially reading ability and effective communication in a formal setting. This course also trains students to be a critical reader who will be able to not only analyze the key moments and literary masterworks of modern China but also reflect on the complexity of Chinese culture vis-à-vis its tradition and the global context. The course is conducted in Mandarin.
New Course
Upcoming conference presentation
"Xiuci 修辭, Leituo leike 雷妥類克, and Rhetoric: Establishing the Discipline of Rhetoric (Xiuci xue 修辭學) in Early Twentieth-Century China"
Association of Asian Studies
Denver (Colorado)
March, 2019
New course
"The Fantastic in Chinese Literature"
Course Description
From the famous human/butterfly metamorphosis in the Daoist text Zhuangzi to contemporary writer Liu Cixin’s award-winning Three-Body Problem, the “fantastic” has always been part of Chinese literature that pushes the boundary of human imagination. Readers and writers create fantastic beasts (though not always know where to find them), pass down incredible tales, assign meanings to unexplainable phenomena, and reject–sometimes embrace–stories that could potentially subvert their established framework of knowledge. Meanwhile, the “fantastic” is also historically and culturally contingent. What one considers “fantastic” reveals as much about the things gazed upon as about the perceiving subject–his or her values, judgment, anxiety, identity, and cultural burden. Using “fantastic” literature as a critical lens, this course takes a thematic approach to the masterpieces of Chinese literature from the first millennium BCE up until twenty-first century China. We will read texts ranging from Buddhist miracle tales to the avant-garde novel about cannibalism, from medieval ghost stories to the creation of communist superheroes during the Cultural Revolution. The topics that we will explore include shifting human/non-human boundaries, representations of the foreign land (also the “underworld”), the aestheticization of female ghosts, utopia and dystopia, and the fantastic as social criticism and national allegory. All materials and discussions are in English.
Blog post
"War of Words: Diplomacy and Rhetoric in Early Medieval China"
https://medium.com/fairbank-center/war-of-words-diplomacy-and-rhetoric-in-early-medieval-china-ec2304e15094
Blog post
"Improvising Poetry in China's Medieval Court"
https://medium.com/fairbank-center/improvising-poetry-in-china-s-medieval-court-43a2f15032cf