Discussant: Thomas Lamarre

The Three-Body Problem or Everything Everywhere All at Once? Notes Toward Writing a History of English Translations of Chinese Poetry

Lucas Klein (PhD Yale) is a father, writer, translator, and associate professor of Chinese at Arizona State University. He is executive editor of the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature (Oxford), author of The Organization of Distance (Brill, 2018), co-editor of Chinese Poetry and Translation (Amsterdam, 2019) and the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation, and translator of Mang Ke (Zephyr, 2018), Li Shangyin (NYRB, 2018), Duo Duo (Yale, 2021), and Xi Chuan (New Directions, 2012, 2022).

• There is a parallel universe wherein Wen Yiduo 聞一多 (1899–1946) could be read before the Chuci 楚辭 (1959) and where the Cold Mountain poet (or poets!) 寒山 and Li He 李賀 (790–816) are among the most important figures in Tang dynasty literature. That corner of the multiverse is translation—literary translation into English, in particular—and it overlaps and interacts with the universe of Chinese literary history as known by Sinologists via interdimensional ruptures that might lead us to question reality. Writing a history of English translations of Chinese poetry, which I am proposing, requires responding to such questioning of reality with an understanding of Chinese literary history from the bronze age to the present day, of the multinational and polycentric history of poetry in English since the Victorian age, and of the history of anglophone conceptualizations of China, from the popular to the scholarly, from the heights of imperialism to the era of post-globalization. Not only that, it also requires understanding the positions and velocities of these histories as they orbit each other, solving for laws of motion and of universal gravitation. In other words, whereas reading Chinese poetry in English translation allows us to experience “everything everywhere all at once,” narrating the history of these translations raises the “three-body problem.” My presentation will lay out some of the issues at stake in undertaking such a project, as well as some of my preliminary observations about the history of English translations of Chinese poetry, based on my readings and my experiences in teaching a graduate course on the topic at two different universities.

Of Walls and Lotuses: On Huanxi, or Is there Virtual Reality in Early Modern China?

Jiayi Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on early modern Chinese literature and its intersections with games, theater, and visual and material cultures. She is completing her dissertation, entitled “Reading Games in Early Modern China,” which explores how games critically informed and actively shaped the ways writers and readers perceived literature during this period.

• This presentation reconsiders the notion of “virtual reality” through the representations of huanxi 幻戲 (lit. “illusory performance”) in early modern Chinese classical tales. Regarded as prototypes of modern magic tricks, huanxi oftentimes oscillated between deception and divine act, while its multi-sensory bodily engagement provides an alternative account against the Western ocularcentrism in terms of magic and modernity. The specific genre of classical tales, written after the style of historical biographies, serves as a central stage for the authors to develop literary mechanisms and conjure up the huanxi performance. Whether it is about an immediate blossom of fragment lotuses or a connection with people within the wall during a banquet, these tales deny a preconditioned line between illusion and reality. Rather, they emphasize the bodily movement and sensational reactions of the spectators from within, hence advocating for the readerly participation in defining the boundaries (or rather a continuum of) the actual and the virtual. Ultimately, through constructing a virtual experience for the readers, their authors explored and commented on the idea of fictionality in early modern China.

The Shijing in the Age(s) of Comparison: Three Moments in the Verification of Equality

Elvin Meng is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, U.S.A. He received his degrees in English and Mathematics from the Johns Hopkins University. Meng is the author of forthcoming articles on literary modernism, media history, and the history of Chinese linguistic thought. His primary research project is a media history of Manchu bilingualism with attention to influences from Mongolian and Tibetan cultural traditions. In addition to his interest in Manchu intellectual history, Meng is interested in the history of aesthetico-political thought, especially radical readings of the Shijing, in second-millennium China.

• This talk strings together three significant moments in which heterodox readings of the Shijing participated in the formation of the concept of (comparative or world) literature: the "Discrimination of Antiquity" (gushi bian) movement spearheaded by Gu Jiegang, Zheng Qiao's anti-hermeneutic reevaluation of the Confucian Classics in the Southern Song dynasty, and Peter Perring Thoms' translation of the Cantonese novel in verse Huajianji in early 19th-century Macao. What these moments have in common is not simply that they are too often overshadowed by better-known (and easier-to-judge) contemporaneous thinkers—Hu Shi, Zhu Xi, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, respectively—but that they, through experiments in translation, dissent from the uneven distribution of capacities implicit in the aesthetico-political program of the Mao "Great Preface." In re-historicizing the Shijing as "streetsong," these moments trace out a lineage of comparative literature that does not presuppose pre-formed distinctions between "elite" and "vernacular" literatures, "source" and "host" cultures, "domesticizing" and "foreignizing" translations, or "Western" and "Chinese" traditions. Theirs was a different kind of compar-ing (in Latin, com-par or "with-equal") that puts into indetermination not only the textual but also the sociopolitical, which—continuing Zheng Qiao's strong misreadings of the Mencius—may be thought of as a program toward a redistribution of sagacity.

Keynote speech with livestream via Zoom.

Modern, Medieval

Jack W. Chen is Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Virginia and incoming Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures. He is the author of The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) and Anecdote, Network, Gossip Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu (Harvard University Asia Center, 2021) and co-editor of Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional Chinese Literature (University o2f California Press, 2013), Literary Information in China: A History (Columbia University Press, 2021), and Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World (Harvard University Asia Center, 2023). He has also written various articles and chapters on topic modeling, medieval historiography, donkey braying, social networks, and reading practices. He is currently completing a monograph on ghosts and poetry, and co-editing the six-volume A Cultural History of Chinese Literatures (Bloomsbury) with Carlos Rojas, for which he is also editor of the second volume, The Medieval Period, 200 CE–900 CE.

Discussant: Paola Iovene

Print Classicism: Rewriting the Shijing in Republican Periodicals

Chloe Estep is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese and Sinophone Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on poetry, media, and material culture in modern China.

• The Book of Songs (Shijing) has been interpreted variously as a collection of folk songs, a source of early Confucian morality, a repository for the full range of human experience and sentiment, and the foundation of the Chinese classical poetic tradition. In this presentation, I will discuss several poems titled New Shijing or New Book of Songs, a few of the roughly 70 New Shijing poems printed in Republican-era periodicals. While classical-style poetry from the modern period is often associated with political conservatism, these New Shijing poems contain a great deal of formal and ideological diversity: the poems are both conservative and progressive, satirical and sincere, literary and popular. In translating the Shijing into a modern milieu, I argue each poem instantiates a new and specific relationship between modernity and poetic classicism that cannot be generalized.
  
  At the turn of the century, a moment of dynastic collapse and literary revolution, it may be surprising to find such a large archive of poems which take the Shijing as their model. At the same time, it makes sense that poets might satirize, deconstruct, or reimagine this text to situate themselves, to understand and articulate the radical social and cultural changes happening around them. Early texts also provide an anchor point for narratives which promote the historical integrity of states, for whom the promotion of an originary wholeness is critical to national and nationalist identity. As such, this project is partly motivated by a desire to expose the inconsistencies in these narratives. By showing the diverse ends to which poetic classicism has been put, these New Shijing poems undermine the notion that classicism is the exclusive or inevitable domain of any particular political ideology.

Historical Fiction as Method: Revisiting Lu Xun’s Old Stories Retold

Satoru Hashimoto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. His research explores interplays between East Asian and European literatures and intellectual histories at the intersections of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. His first monograph, Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea (forthcoming with Columbia University Press in 2023), examines how modern literature in China, Japan, and Korea was produced in the contexts of these nations’ interrelated cultural traditions. He is working on his second book on the transcultural history of postwar East Asia from 1945 to 1953.

• My presentation revisits Lu Xun’s Old Stories Retold to explore a transhistorical method to approach modern Chinese literature. Historical fiction was not only attempted by many eminent authors in modern China, but it also assumed great cultural, social, and political import across high and low literatures, often inspiring transmedial adaptations. One of the earliest examples of this prolific genre, Lu Xun’s historical fiction weds the depth of the past ungraspable in the present with the height of formal innovations in search for modernity’s meaning in history. It calls for reassessing the usual understanding of modern literature based on the idea of severance from past cultures and urges us to instead bring back to reading modern texts precisely the sort of cultural past that modernization relegates to something passé, ahistorical, or irrelevant. My presentation draws from Old Stories Retold a method to examine modern Chinese literature as it emerged through writerly attempts at reconstructing the present’s historical relationship to the past across the radical cultural transformations caused by modernization. It elucidates the writer’s anachronistic engagement with classical cultures that are made obsolete by modernization as a hitherto underexplored textual dynamic integral to the beginnings of modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun’s historical fiction prompts us to reconceptualize the origins of modern literature in China in a broader cultural historical context and to reassess its engagement with world literature.

Rewriting Chinese: A Stylistic Approach to Old Tales Retold

Yueling Ji is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation studies the history and methodology of Chinese literary criticism with the aim of understanding the concept of "style" in literature. She is a dissertation completion residential fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities in 2022-23.

• That the translation of foreign languages into Chinese is stylistically damaging to the modern Chinese language is a complaint repeatedly voiced by Chinese intellectuals since the beginning of the twentieth century. This paper joins the discussion on this close relationship between translation and literary style, but approaches this relationship from a different angle. It takes into consideration the translation of Classical Chinese writing into the vernacular Chinese language–a task constantly performed by Chinese intellectuals, past and present, but insufficiently studied and not well understood.
  
  To this end, this paper studies two stories in Lu Xun’s Old Tales Retold, “Gathering Ferns” and “Anti-Agression.” It compares these stories to the prior textual versions of the same narratives, from the Yizhoushu, Shangshu, Shiji, and Mozi. Furthermore, it consults Lu Xun’s manuscript drafts in order to reconstruct the writing process of the stories. In this way, it illustrates, at the scale of the sentence, how Lu Xun rewrote Classical Chinese into his version of the modern Chinese literary language. The result of this effort is a hybrid language, mixing Europeanized grammar with Classical Chinese phrasing, which is a main constituent characteristic of Lu Xun's distinct writing style.

Subtle Stirrings: Xiwei and Women in Eileen Chang’s Modern Fiction

Jiwei Xiao is Professor of Chinese at Fairfield University, specializing in Chinese literature and global cinema. She is the author of Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature (published by Routledge in 2022). Her articles on Chinese literature and cinema are published by various journals, such as New Left Review, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, MCLC, Film Quarterly, among others. She has also written for Cineaste, New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic as a freelance contributor.

• Literary details become telling when they reveal the dynamics of seeing and hearing, the resonances of the mind, the intricacies of the everyday, and the imperatives of recognizing the minute, the humble, and the concealed. A detail does not “exist” as a static object but often “emerges” as a dynamic perception, a recognition, or a recollection. In Eileen Chang’s case, her innovative use of detail, combined with her heightened consciousness of the female perspective, enable her to reinvent the traditional xiji xiaoshuo 細節小說 into a distinctive modern fictional form. In her writing, the concept of xijie 細節 or xiwei 細微 takes on new significance as she employs details to evoke moments of psychological-ethical stirrings, with women occupying the center of the subtle ruptures and fissures. Drawing on my discussions in Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature (2022), my presentation will explore the intertwined ethical-aesthetic dimensions of xiwei in Eileen Chang’s work, examining the relationship between her critical reinterpretation of (lower-class) women in the traditional xijie xiaoshuo and her engagement with new female experiences and female consciousness in modern times.

Discussant: Judith Zeitlin

Some Preliminary Notes for a Dynamic History of Poetic Genres in the Tang-Song Transition

Thomas Mazanec is assistant professor of premodern Chinese literature and cultural studies at UC Santa Barbara. His first monograph, Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press. His research, centered on medieval Chinese poetry, also touches upon digital humanities, religious studies, comparative literature, and translation studies.

• Literary history has long been plagued by the problem of scale. How do we account for literary change beyond a single “period”? How to make sense of the vast, changing systems of relations among texts; between texts, people, and the world; and among the critical, social, political, intellectual, and material conditions that shape the production of texts? The answer, I propose, is a combination of macro- and microscopic analysis that would highlight the dynamism and agency of texts, genres, their producers, and their audiences. Building on methods developed by scholars of English literature, as well as some used in my forthcoming book Poet-Monks, I aim to show how digital tools and statistical modeling can highlight changes in poetic genres during the Tang-Song transition. Preliminary analysis of the 47,967 surviving poems of the Tang and the 250,674 of the Song suggests greater stylistic continuity within a given genre than within a given time period—though this varies considerably for each category. Such findings prompt us to return to individual texts, poets, and contexts to understand the major forces initiating change or resisting it. In this way, I propose that digital methods should be used in dialectical combination with analog ones, honing literary historians’ questions and pointing them to neglected materials. Digital methods are a beginning, not an end, to literary research.

Martial Arts Fiction as Method

Iris Ma is a scholar of literary and cultural studies specializing in late imperial China and the modern Chinese-speaking world. Her research engages with questions related to popular writing and reading, gender, popular religion, Cross-Strait cultural exchange, and the problematic notion of “Chinese-ness.” She examines Chinese narrative tradition and cultural products generated in print, on screen, and in cyberspace in an effort to better understand and explain how ideas, particularly popular perceptions of and responses to socio-political changes, were created, disseminated, and appropriated through popular writing, reading, and viewing and how the past has shaped and continues to influence the contemporary Chinese-speaking world. Her work has been published in top peer-reviewed journals including Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review. Her chapter on the making of Taiwanese martial arts literature appeared in the edited volume Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming (Routledge, 2019). She is currently working on her first monograph, which examines the metamorphosis of Chinese martial arts literature and culture from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ma holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

• Literary works published during the first two decades of the twentieth century seem to be placed in a liminal space: in various literary histories written in both Chinese and English they are categorized by some scholars as “late Qing literature,” by others as “modern literature,” by still others as a “early twentieth-century literature,” and yet overlooked by others completely. This position of liminality reflects the ambiguity of those two decades in Chinese history which has greatly influenced the periodization of Chinese literary studies. Focusing on two loosely defined martial arts fictional works published during the first decade of the twentieth century, i.e., Xianxia wuhua jian 仙侠五花剑 (Immortal Knights-Errant and Five Flower Swords, 1901), a novel written by Haishang jianchi 海上剑痴 (A sword addict in Shanghai), and a short story titled “Dao Yusheng Zhuan” 刀余生传 (Biography of Dao Yusheng, 1904) by “Cold Blood” 冷血, this paper discusses the pitfall associated with historical periodization in Chinese literary studies and explores an alternative methodology that promises to overcome chronological compartmentalization and, instead, emphasizes continuity in creating, re-creating, and analyzing literary works.

Aural Fiction in Wartime China, 1939-1942

Siting Jiang is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include modern Chinese literature, the formation of literary communities, writing and aurality, history of reading, and sound studies.

• In this paper, I study the experiments on writing fiction for an illiterate listening audience by Chinese leftist writers in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The interaction between the oral and the written traditions is an important problem of inquiry in premodern Chinese literary studies. In modern Chinese literature, although the interaction is also robust and takes on new forms and meanings that deserve research, it has not attracted enough scholarly attention. This lacuna, partly due to the modern construction that opposes the oral and the folk with the literary and the modern, partly due to the discipline of modern literary studies that still very much revolves around notions of authorship, text and close reading, could potentially confine the object of inquiry of modern Chinese literary studies to a narrow canon and certain modes of writing and reading. In this paper, I show how the relationship between the oral and the written is a central issue in the wartime Chinese literary sphere, by studying how leftist writers such as Hu Kao 胡考 and Zhao Shuli 赵树理 think about the orality/aurality of fiction, the stakes involved in such discussions, and the actual writing and performing practices. By placing the wartime aural fiction experiments within a larger problem complex of the oral and the written that stretches across the premodern/modern divide, I argue that this is a site where the methods and concerns of premodern and modern literary studies could have productive dialogues.

Paola Iovene (UChicago EALC)
Julie Orlemanski (UChicago English)
Anne Eakin Moss (UChicago Salvic)
Melissa Van Wyk (UChicago EALC)