Rereading a Poetics of Divination: Oracular Visuality and Iterations of Landscape in Wei-Jin LyricismNoel, Thomas Donnelly
2022 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-9965606
While Chinese poets of the early medieval period have long been credited with the development of shanshui 山水 (landscape) poetry, the precursors of the prosody they employed merit further scrutiny. This article argues that an ancient poetics of visual augury informed early medieval shanshui lyricism and that similar iterations of nature writing emerged earlier than is often recognized. By tracing the use of the divinatory utterance yangfu 仰俯 (looking up and looking down) in earlier depictions of the natural world, the author reconsiders the visual poetics of later shanshui literature alongside texts that use analogous mantic terminology. This study concludes that, while China's first “nature poets” constructed imagery, lyrics, and personae that appear distinct if not even contradictory to one another, the poets relied on a common visual prosody derived from preestablished mantic approaches to the natural world and its representation. In so doing, this article also further highlights the underappreciated prosodic and ideological indebtedness of later shanshui poets to the authors of the Eastern Han and provides insight into the correlations that ran between diverse forms of linguistic visuality and the poetic explorations of the natural world in early China.
The Power of Nostalgia: Memory, Identity, and Authority in the Shishuo xinyuHu, Qiulei
2022 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-9965619
The Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 (A New Account of Tales of the World) is a collection of anecdotes concerning extraordinary historical figures active in the second through fourth centuries. This article highlights and explores the importance of the Shishuo xinyu as cultural memory. In the collection, the public display and use of personal memory of the cultural past are taken as means to preserve cultural legacy, construct cultural identity, and establish cultural authority in the elite literati community. Cultural memory gained much significance after the migration of the Western Jin 西晉 (265–316) royal house and aristocratic families to the south after its fall. On one hand, shared memory and the sharing of memory of the past created an unbroken chain of cultural legacy and secured the elite literati's cultural identities in a “continuous” tradition; on the other hand, personal memory and the monopoly of memory were crucial tools to claim cultural privilege in the highly competitive community of elite literati. The peculiar nature of the anecdote as a cross between private and public matters, as well as between local and universal knowledge, lends itself perfectly to carrying out the various social functions of cultural memory. The attention to cultural memory in the Shishuo xinyu was not an accidental or isolated phenomenon. Its sentimental and personal approach to the past reflects the prevailing cultural nostalgia in writings by elite literati of the fourth and fifth centuries.
“In the Mountain Forest I Lose My Self”: The Experience of No-Self in Wang Wei's Short Landscape PoemsTähtinen, Tero
2022 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-9965632
This article discusses the dialectics of subject and object in Wang Wei's short landscape poems from the perspective of Buddhist metaphysics. First, the article traces Wang's Buddhist connections and surveys the Buddhist concepts, ideas, and practices of which Wang himself explicitly wrote in his essays and poems. Then it uses these ideas to analyze poems from his “Wang Stream Collection” (Wangchuan ji). The conjunctive theme of this article is the underlying emptiness of all existing phenomena, one of the main metaphysical doctrines of Mahayana philosophy and a recurrent motif in Wang's poetry. The author demonstrates that, when seen from the standpoint of emptiness, the relation of the perceiver and the perceived in Wang's short nature poems proves to be more sophisticated than usually thought. Because both the human agent and the natural objects around him are intrinsically empty, they are interrelated and interdependent in the act of perception at the deepest and the most subtle ontological level.
What Do Jokes Reveal about Trust in Ming Work Relations?Schneewind, Sarah
2022 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-9965645
This article looks at jokes in a collection dating to about 1610 from the perspective of occupational sociology of the Chicago school. Sociological concepts such as technique, object of technique, and guilty knowledge suggest aspects of the lives of ordinary people who are harder to find in the historical record than the educated elite. The jokes illuminate some of the tensions in the careers of metalworkers, vendors, carpenters, actors, transport workers, barbers, couriers, pawnbrokers, and gatekeepers to suggest further avenues for historical research. Trust emerges as a complex issue. The professional relations suggest a more plebian, but not simple, outlook on the fundamental Confucian value of trustworthiness.
Space and Identity: Self-Representation of a Ming Nanjing Courtesan in TransformationChen, Jiani
2022 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-9965658
This article examines the poetic collections of the Ming woman writer Yang Wan 楊宛 (ca. 1600–ca. 1647), whose transformation of identity from a courtesan celebrity to a gentry wife was one of the most representative in the category of courtesan turned concubine/wife. Her marriage lasted for decades, and her role as a family woman fully developed over time. By approaching her writings from the perspective of space, it reveals how a woman perceived and interpreted her changing status by framing her self-representation and emotional expression within two feminine spaces: the pleasure quarter and the inner chamber. Yang Wan's identity transformation and her strategic exploration of the gendered spaces along with their diverse symbolic codes contribute to our knowledge of the social, textual, and cultural mobility of late imperial China.
The Boundary of Chinese Music: A Cultural and Aesthetic Comparison between Pipa and GuqinZou, Ivan Yifan; Tsai, Yaching; Wang, William Shi-Yuan
2022 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-9965671
Reform and innovation toward the Western standards have been a perennial theme in the modern history of Chinese music. However, reformers can be easily overwhelmed by various details, to the point that the most fundamental question, What is Chinese music?, is often obscured. In a sense, we have to define the boundary of Chinese music to determine what new elements should be integrated and what traditional features should be preserved. Chinese music is a highly diverse and complex system, yet traditional Chinese culture emphasizes the importance of homogeneity over heterogeneity due to the constant need for political unity and demand of a single market. However, cultural identity cannot be constructed by homogeneity alone since the boundary of culture can only be best identified when examining its heterogeneity. Pipa and guqin, which represent Chinese musical cultures under significant and little Western influence, respectively, provide an ideal window through which the boundary of Chinese music might be delineated. By discussing the aesthetic pursuits and evolutionary paths that are distinct between the two instruments, the article aims to initiate a small step toward a better understanding of how Chinese music is indeed a highly complex and heterogeneous system in which various musical cultures, despite their distinct origins, can come into contact, interact, fuse, and eventually achieve the state of “unity in diversity.”