session D: Saturday, October 10, 3:45-5:15 p.m.
D1 Women as Role Models, Icons, and Workers in Asia | 203 Lawrence
Chair: LINDA DWYER, Salisbury University
JOOYEON HAHM, University of Pennsylvania
The Status of Wife, Concubine, and Women in Colonial Korea
This paper examines the changing legal and social status of the concubine and her progeny in the colonial period through reviewing the Keijō High Court cases and newspaper articles. These sources will shed light upon some salient features of household structure and gender expectations at the threshold of modernity. In addition, it aims at comprehending the colonial legal regime and evaluating the evolving status of women in the family and society. The status of concubine relegated with the 1915 nominal abolition of concubinage, but the enhanced status of her children threatened the prestige of wife. While the status hierarchy protected her privilege in Chosŏn Korea, she now had to bear a son to secure her position in the household. The modern family law, which warranted the integrity of monogamous marriage on the surface, ironically resulted in evaluating a woman’s worth by her reproductive ability instead of her natal origin or wifely conducts.
ALAN BAUMLER, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Li Xiaqing, Aviation, and Modern Chinese Women.
Li Xiaqing, a former movie actress turned aviator turned philanthropist, was an important symbol of modern Chinese womanhood in both China and overseas in the 1930s. This paper will look at how she was portrayed in the American press during her flying tour of the U.S. for China relief in the early years of the War of Resistance and her portrayal inside China, where the image of a modern woman flying an airplane was more problematic. In both places she was a significant part of the Nanjing government's attempts to create an image of a modern, technological citizenry.
MICHAEL STONE, Seton Hall University
The Legacy of Qiu Jin
Arguably the second most famous person from China's Xinhai Revolution of 1911, Qiu Jin's actual role in the Revolution's success was small but her martyrdom has survived as an icon throughout different phases of modern Chinese history. Following her execution by beheading in 1907, various groups have appropriated her to support their individual causes. She was clearly a gifted poet and essayist. But what was her true legacy?
I will briefly recount her life as a willful girl interested in classical literature and martial arts, through her conversion to feminism and the anti-Qing movement, to her death at the hands of imperial forces. Then I will trace her evolving posthumous reputation reflecting China’s changing political landscape including her friends’ efforts to preserve her name and writings, the Xinhai Revolutionaries’ use of her as a model revolutionary to support their government, how Yuan Shikai tried to erase her memory because of her association with his rival Sun Yet-sen. Zhou Enlai praised her to gain regional support for the communists but the Cultural Revolution later rejected her because she pre-dated Mao Zedong’s leadership. More recently, her story has been retold in plays, television, operas, textbooks, movies and comic books. Ultimately, I conclude that most of the images of her are exaggerated or misleading but her true contribution was being among China’s first feminist activists and her eloquence, heroic tenacity and feminist message influenced early communists who made gender equality part of their tenets.
D2 Examining Texts and Images in Late Qing and Republican China | 205 Lawrence
Chair: CHIP DESNOYERS, La Salle University
YUN ZHU, Temple Univeristy
Gender, Nation, Cosmopolitanism: The Reconstruction of the Chinese “Women’s Sphere” in Women in All Lands and the Lin loon Magazine
Since the rise of feminism in China in the last decade of the Qing dynasty, the term “women’s sphere” has played a significant role in the Chinese discourse on women, gender, and nation. This paper discusses the reconstruction of the “women’s sphere” in the Chinese social imaginary between the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 by examining two important texts. One is the 21-volume Women in All Lands, or China’s Place among the Nations: A Philosophic Study of Comparative Civilizations, Ancient and Modern (1903-1905) edited and translated by the American missionary Young John Allen (aka Lin Lezhi, 1836-1907); the other is the popular women’s magazine Lin Loon (aka Linglong, 1931-1937). I contend that their respective treatments of Chinese women reveal interesting interplay among the various perspectives – indigenous, foreign, male, female – through which the so-called “women’s issue” is looked at and understood in relation to China’s own position and status in the world.
BIN CHEN, Penn State University
Understanding Character Yi: Foreign Merchants and Business Newspapers in Early Nineteenth Century China.
My paper uses the Canton Register, the first English newspaper publishing in China by British merchants, to argue that business newspapers played an important role in reintrepreting China and Chinese culutre to the foreigners, even if these foreigners lived in China. The Canton Register used the issue of the character yi to demonstrate China’s arrogance, backwardness, and ignorance, and also to legitimize their further actions against China. The study on the dispute over the character yi is relied on the sources written by officials and missionaries. However, merchants and business newspapers’ role should be emphasized. In the larger part of the nineteenth century, merchants was the biggest group of foreigners in China. The Canton Register contained many articles on the issue of character yi. Merchants inclinded to use their understanding of Chinese culture to guide their actions in China. Their understanding of yi has the similar function.
MARK McNICHOLAS, Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College
Tools of Deception: Speech, Letters, and Props in an Imposture Case from Qing China
This paper explores an impersonation case from Qing China (1644-1912). In 1786 a wandering ex-convict separately persuaded an innkeeper and a mule driver that he was a noble scion and high official named “Fu Tianbao,” sent by the Qianlong emperor on a secret mission to observe the Muslims of Gansu province. Prevailing on his victims to give him money, clothing, and a horse, he dispatched them to Beijing with phony letters to his alleged mother and promises of official position.
Archival records show how the fraud carried off his impostures. Starting with intriguing stories told in mock confidence, he continued by writing letters and showing them to his victims. He also referred to articles of clothing supposedly bestowed upon him by the emperor. These manipulations of speech, writing, and physical objects authenticated “Fu’s” mission and his personal connections to the throne, enabling him to turn wary strangers into dupes.
PAUL RICKETTS, University of California, San Diego
Global Montage and the Circulation of Modernist Photography in Interwar Illustrated Magazines
During the 1920s and 1930s photographs from the German New Objectivity and Bauhaus design movements circulated around the world via illustrated mass magazines. In China and Japan the New Photography was, in part, spread through pictorials that featured the works of avant-garde European artists, such as Hannah Hoch, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Umbo. East Asian magazine designers of publications, such as Liangyou (The Young Companion), Shidai (Modern Miscellany), Koga (Shining Picture), Hanzai Kagaku (Criminology), and the Gendai ryoki sentan zukan (Pictorial of the Modern, Curiosity Hunting, and the Avant-Garde), often reproduced images from Western Europe and the Soviet Union. These illustrations were accompanied by translated captions from the original publications or by editorial comments outlining particular graphic innovations. This paper will chart the transmission and reception of particularly influential modernist photographs and photomontages as they were reissued in Shanghai and Tokyo pictorials of the interwar period.
D3 Chinese Cinema in the 20th and 21st Century| 1500 Posvar
Chair: Tina Phillips Johnson, Saint Vincent College
XIAOLING SHI, Allegheny College
The Absurd Existence: Underneath the Comicality of the Piano in a Factory
There is no cynicism of socialist past or downright postmodern posture in The Piano in a Factory as in the films by Emir Kusturica, a Yugoslav director whose attention is also paid to the transitional periods from socialism to postsocialism in a socialist state. Instead, acclaimed by the film critic Dai Jinhua as one of the best contemporary Chinese movies, The Piano in a Factory resembles Chekhov’s theatre, in particularly The Cherry Orchard, in that it uses humor as a strategy to evade and elude and to cope with the absurdity of life. The first section of my presentation establishes what makes the movie and the play analogous: both stories take place in “Cherry Orchard situation,” a situation characterized by “indiscriminate annihilation of the past.” By analyzing symbolisms of smokestacks and three funerals in the movie, this section places in the foreground the background of the story by which the motif of the film grows into more prominent. The next section deals with the comicality of characters through anatomizing what makes it comical. Humorous occasions or farcical incidents are given thorough examinations in light of comedy theories without leaving out analyses of individuals in the movie. Nonetheless, modern criticism perceives that comedy is “a logic of the absurd” and “can tell us many things about our situation even tragedy cannot.” Underneath the comicality of The Piano in a Factory, I discover the absurd existence experienced by the characters. The third section thus devotes to expounding on how their life is absurd by applying to the movie existentialists’ views on absurdity. The awareness of the absurd is tragic but the way characters experience the absurd is often farcical. My investigation of how what is said is undercut by what is done, and how the verbal is undercut by the visual, illustrates entanglements of the comical and the absurd in the movie. Last but not the least, the final section reveals the motif of the film by examining peripeties of the lighthearted comedy that are either poetic or passionate and hence discordant with the overall tonality. Just as Chekhov extends hope in his theatre, this is where the director’s humanism lies.
KAREN KINGSBURY, Chatham University
Eileen Chang, John P. Marquand, and Heddy Lamarr: Rewriting WASP Realism in Half a Lifelong Romance
This paper investigates the precipitating effects of a 1941 star turn by Austrian-born Hollywood actress Heddy Lamarr on the evolution of Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance (Bansheng yuan; 1951, rev. 1969). Chang’s novel re-works John P. Marquand’s H.M. Pulham, Esq., but Lamarr’s role in this process has not yet been studied. Drawing on the new translation of Chang’s novel that was published in London last July (US edition scheduled for spring 2016), this paper studies the evolution of Half a Lifelong Romance from a perspective that is both cross-cultural and multi-modal (considering multiple cinematic and literary influences), in order to show how Chang moved this tale through and beyond the picket-fence boundaries of WASP realism.
LI-LIN TSENG, Pittsburg State University
From Shanghai to Hollywood: Chinese Cinema in Transition, 1896-1937
This paper examines the formation of Shanghai film industry between 1896 and 1937. By the 1920s, Hollywood films dominated 90% of the market in China. However, in 1930, domestic film production in Shanghai was already challenging Hollywood’s local dominance. My paper focuses on the multifaceted conflict as well as international cooperation between Shanghai and the Hollywood studios. Critical issues within the period of investigation include the development of the transnational partnerships between the two centers as well as the proliferation of global coalitions among various Shanghai and Hollywood film companies. I argue that the establishment of the Shanghai film industry was enriched by the ambivalent relationship of “competition and cooperation” among those Chinese and Hollywood producers and filmmakers who journeyed back and forth across continents and cultures. These professionals developed and strengthened linkages between the two nations, accelerating cultural exchanges and cross-cultural dialogue and revitalizing a newly dynamic Chinese civilization.
YUN-CHU TSAI, University of California, Irvine
A Delicacy to Fulfill ‘the Lack’: Fetus-Consumption in Li Bihua’s Dumplings
A Delicacy to Fulfill 'the Lack': Fetus-Consumption in Li Bihua's Dumplings analyzes how Li Bihua uses the birth of cannibals as an allegory for the devaluation and commodification of women in a capitalistic society. In the novel and adapted film, Dumplings, the consumption of human fetuses exposes not only the shift of the Chinese economic paradigm and its impact on the human psychic condition, but also the unequal gender power structure between men and women in contemporary Chinese society. I will also explore the Chinese medical discourse on the potential health benefit of cannibalism to analyze the relationships between delicacies, the desire for food, and capitalism. By revealing the phenomenon of cannibalism, Li Bihua demonstrates the transformation, reincarnation, and evolution of the cannibalistic ideology that has pervaded Chinese society.
D4 Border Disputes, Economics, and International Relations in Asia | 1501 Posvar
Chair: SHARLIE USHIODA, Merion School District (retired)
ELIZABETH LAWRENCE, Ball State University
Sisterly Affection or Sibling Rivalry: China-Japan Sister Cities, 1979-2012
In 2012, Nanjing, China and Nagoya, Japan had a falling out. Nanjing suspended ties with its sister city after the mayor of Nagoya offended Chinese officials with the controversial suggestion that the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 had never actually happened. The sister city mission, to foster international exchange and citizen diplomacy, was in this case no match for the ill-will surrounding divergent memories of Japan’s conduct in World War II. Taking up the theme of “Asia: Conflict and Cooperation,” this paper focuses on the history of “sister” pairings between Chinese and Japanese cities from 1979 to 2012. Drawing on Chinese-language sources, and applying digital tools to the mapping and visualization of China’s sister city networks, I analyze city-to-city cooperation and its limits in light of larger issues of globalization, Cold War thaw, city branding, local identity, and the role of non-governmental organizations in diplomacy.
JESSICA JORDAN, University of Pittsburgh
“Islands Too Beautiful for Their Names:” Everyday Life and Postwar Nationalized Historiographies in the Northern Mariana Islands
Mainstream understandings of early 20th century Japanese imperialism in the Pacific region portray Japan’s historical presence as a military regime and an enemy of the U.S. in the Second World War. Such understandings reflect nationalized historiographies that construct forms of consciousness tied to nation states as the source of knowledge about history, and which connect various territories and populations of Japan’s old empire to contemporary national centers of political control. In the Northern Mariana Islands (NMI) in the western Pacific, Japanese colonialism involved among the highest rates of settlement in the empire such that Japanese, Koreans, and Okinawans outnumbered indigenous Carolinian and Chamorro islanders by a ratio of ten to one by the late 1930s. Local towns built around the sugar industry were places where diverse populations mingled and intermarried, resulting in intimacies and lasting family ties that remain important to local communities yet unacknowledged by dominant historiographies. Multiracial families that emerged during the period of Japanese colonialism today comprise a significant minority population in the NMI, and their ambivalent and nostalgic stories about the Japanese days exceed what is possible to know within nationalized understandings of the past.
FERGUSON EVANS, Independent Scholar
Japan Takes on China
Japanese companies have been hugely affected by the rise of China over the past three decades or so in terms of what they produce, where they locate their operations, and the markets they serve. The first of these three perspectives, can be illustrated through the electronic/electrical appliance, steel and machine tool industries, all of which gained world leadership status as Japan’s economic prowess progressed. China is now eroding this dominance. The answer for the Japanese is select and focus; the question lies in their agility in responding. Secondly, Japanese firms are increasingly concerned with where China is posited in the dynamic supply chain paradigm. Its size apart, early on China could be classified along with other East Asian nations, proximate and undeveloped enough to meld in with Japan’s expanding ambitions. However, this equation has undergone a dramatic evolution. Production relocation and automation are called for. Finally, China is becoming a potent rival in the global arena, forcing Japanese firms to reassess their options geographically and structurally, both in the face of emerging Chinese rivalry.
DAVID OWEN, Millersville University of Pennsylvania
Shared Identities on the Korean Peninsula: An Empirical Investigation into South Korean Affection towards North Koreans
While some have suggested South Korean affection towards North Koreans is prominent and built upon various individual and group level attributes, recent findings paint a different picture. Proposed causes of South Korean affection towards North Koreans range from a sense of common ancestry to socioeconomic status and demographics; however, empirical support is lacking. This study contributes to our understanding of South Korean affection towards the north by answering the question of what causes South Korean affection towards North Koreans. I probe deeper into these South Korean affections by specifically investigating shared South Korean identities as causes of affection: Korean nation identity, state identity, transnational identity, capitalist identity and an outsider identity. I use ordered logistical regression to test hypotheses derived from these shared identity propositions with cross-sectional public opinion data from the 2004 and 2006 waves of the Asian Barometer. The results have important implications for relations and possible unification on the Korean Peninsula, in addition to the study of North Korean politics.
D5 China Kaleidoscope: Extending Domestic Initiatives and Global Engagement | 1700 Posvar
Chair and Discussant: RYA BUTTERFIELD, Nicholls State University
JOY JIAO YANG, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
“Brand” New China: Culture, Heritage, and Harmony in the Global Business of National Identity
This paper targets the role of “nation branding” within global mediascapes to add to conversations about globalization and nationalism. Nation-states have adopted commercial models of self-promotion to gain recognition and benefits in the global marketplace, treating national identity as a brand asset. In the past decade, China as a newly emerged enterprise state spared no efforts in branding and re-branding its national image, to gain recognition and benefits (from the international audience) and loyalty and cohesion (from the domestic audience).
This paper addresses some recent cases of branding China, from hosting international mega-events to the global cultural tourism promotion, as well as the most contemporary “China Dream” campaign. Although these cases differ in scale, style, and audience, they share two basic strategies in common: first, these campaigns are conducted in a de-politicized and hyper-cultural way, which I call “post-political politics. Second, in the era of commercial nationalism, branding new China is made possible with a new partnership between the government and the private sectors. Transnational branding/marketing is a key to explain cultural flows that continue to alter the classic markers of human identity such as nation, culture, modernity and language, and to complicate dominant explanatory frames surrounding cultural globalization, such as theories of cultural imperialism and hybridity.
WEIMING YAO-GORMAN, University of Pittsburgh
Let’s Chat: An Analysis of Conversation as Metaphor Employed in Wen Jiabao’s Web Chat with the Chinese Netizens
In recent years, the Chinese government has been striving to use the Internet for effective governance. Wen Jiabao, the former Chinese premier, conducted the first Internet exchange in 2009 with Chinese netizens in Web Chat, one of China’s most popular social media forums. This paper argues that Wen exploited conversation as a metaphor by conflating interaction with involvement and empowerment for the netizens. Wen constructed his speaker identity to be that of an endearing and virtuous leader; he constructed viewer identity to be that of an earnest and empowered citizen participant. Wen intended the online exchange to be a model of an “imagined virtual society” in which the Chinese government and Chinese citizens enjoyed a harmonious relationship—the government was sensitive and responsive to the needs and wants of its citizens. These citizens were to believe that their rights and needs had been heard, and, thereafter, would be rightfully rectified and served by the government. It was Wen’s hope that the recollections of the online dialogues would create a “collective memory” among the netizen community, thereby aligning their discrete political ideologies with those of the government. Furthermore, Wen assumed that this projected harmony between the two parties would become modular—capable of being transplanted to a variety of social relationships and, thus, normalizing the conversation metaphor.
BRIAN GREENE, University of Pittsburgh
Case Study of Globalization in Higher Education: Peer Mentoring for Chinese Nursing Undergraduates on an Exchange Program at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Nursing
A growing number of Chinese students are forgoing the grueling national college entrance examination in China to pursue undergraduate studies in colleges and universities in the United States. Because of insufficient preparation, unrealistic expectations, and language difficulties, some of these Chinese undergraduate students are facing academic dismissal due to low GPA, academic dishonesty, and low attendance. Meanwhile, in the grips of globalization, U.S. colleges and universities are actively pursuing partnership strategies to host such students to promote global competence and, perhaps, meet their respective bottom lines. The School of Nursing at the University of Pittsburgh will be hosting its first cohort of Chinese undergraduate nursing exchange students, who will arrive to begin a 1-year exchange program in fall, 2015. To promote the success of not only this exchange partnership, but also that of the students themselves, this paper argues for the establishment of a peer-mentor program to help these students transition to the specific demands of undergraduate nursing education at Pitt. Rather than merely provide the types of academic and cultural support featured in the current literature, this peer-mentor program, through the application of quantitative methods, will collect feedback from the Chinese undergraduate nursing students to ensure that the support provided is the support that is required by these students in this particular social context of education.
ELISE MOERSCH, University of Pittsburgh
Enhancing Global Engagement Competence
There is little doubt that institutions around the globe are beginning to focus more attention on engaging with their alumni network. Motivations are often part financial, part reputational. Although the United States has been rightly regarded as the leader in this field with alumni engagement at the heart of its strategic plans, other leading global institutions are developing innovative tools, processes and methodology to ensure that they have an active alumni body contributing to recruitment, student employability, university life, and, indeed, financial priorities.This panel discussion will look at the institutional relationship with international students from their first day on campus to their contribution as valued alumni. We will discuss policies and activities that have had demonstrated success in meeting both the needs of the international student and goals of the institution. We will be exploring a range of case studies and strategies.
D6 Cultural Conflict, Cooperation, and Exchange in Contemporary China
5130 Posvar
Chair: ZIYING YOU, Ohio State University
ZIYING YOU, Ohio State University
Negotiating Heritage: Conflict and Cooperation in the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Hongdong, Shanxi, China
This work addresses the conflict and cooperation among different social actors in the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) in a local context. The ethnographic case study concerns the living tradition of worshipping the ancient sage-kings Yao and Shun as well as Ehuang and Nüying, who are both Yao’s daughters and Shun’s wives, in several villages in Hongdong County, Shanxi Province, China. Named as an item of national ICH in 2008, the official title of this local tradition is Hongdong Zouqin Xisu, “the custom of visiting sacred relatives in Hongdong.” I explore the ways different social actors have competed and negotiated with each other in the process of transmitting, producing, and reproducing local tradition. Particularly, I analyze contentious relationships between the key folk groups which sponsor annual temple fairs and ritual processions (shè), temple reconstruction associations, and the state in the safeguarding of local tradition as China’s national ICH.
YUANHAO ZHAO, Ohio State University
Unsettled by Trade: Snapshots of Exchange Activities in a Muslim Village of North China
My fieldwork site is a Northern Chinese village inhabited by the “Hui” people, a “Muslim Minority”. Starting from a stereotype that the Hui people make cunning merchants, my work tries to answer the question of how trading and exchange activities among different agents helped to realize state interest, to challenge dominant powers, and to express minority identities… in short, how in trading, or by trading, one agent is forced or persuaded to accept a price for something, or something for a price. I find out that in real cases this price or “something” is not always neatly defined, effects of trading/exchanges are often multilateral and agents’ activities about/in exchange activities cannot be interpreted conveniently with any single-directional concept. As a threshold phenomenon, trading or exchange helps in any of its stage to define and re-define power-relationship, to represent a microbiology of the field, and to announce agents’ social conditions and competence.
TSUN-HUI HUNG, University of Cincinnati
A Legendary Lion in the Contemporary World—Development and Changes of the Lion Dance in Taiwan
The dynamic spectacle of the lion dance is now a seemingly requisite part of celebratory events in Chinese communities around the world. The sight of larger than life lion puppets, manipulated from within by men and women, twisting and leaping in time with cymbals and drums are playful icons of traditional Chinese culture. But since lions have never been a part of China’s natural landscape, how did they come to be such iconic inhabitants of the Chinese cultural landscape? Answering this question takes us on an interesting journey through some of the most striking terrain of world history. I will discuss the changes and developments in nineteenth and twentieth century Taiwan. The Lion Dance has changed dramatically when the country was accepting immigrants from China, then governed by Japan in the early twentieth century, and finally joined the globalization in the 80s.
D7 Re-examining Some Seminal Critical Concepts and Practices Since the Late Imperial Period | 203 Lawrence
Chair: CECILE CHU-CHIN SUN, University of Pittsburgh
Discussant: KATHERINE CARLITZ, University of Pittsburgh
CHUN MEI, Independent Scholar
Of Heaven and of Humans: Ethics, Levinas, and Late Imperial Chinese Literature
This paper proposes a reading of the relationship between humans and heaven (tian) as portrayed in late imperial Chinese fiction informed by the ethical theories of the renowned French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). Late imperial fiction writers declared the ethical significance of their works by constantly representing and revising the relationship between humans and tian, which was itself a central concept in Chinese philosophy. The anthropomorphized tian was not just an ordering patriarch (tiangong) meting out exact amounts of justice in the human realm nor an unjust, impetuous teenager (zaohua xiao’er), as two common yet contrastive views suggest. Instead, tian figures in late imperial fiction as the other, in a Levinasian sense: the other is an absolute alterity of whom the self has only a partial knowledge of and yet to whom it is obligated to respond to be considered ethical. Characters signify in their relationship with this other, and plots unfold in an exploration of the ideal ways to deal with alterity. To explore these relationships, I will give a close reading to two ethical moments in the early Qing historical romance Xu yinglie zhuan (Illustrious heroes, a sequel), about the Yongle Emperor’s (r. 1402-1424) dramatic and controversial usurpation of the throne from his nephew, the Jianwen Emperor (r. 1399-1402). In these ethical moments, the Hongwu (r. 1368-1398) and Jianwen emperors each confront the horns of dilemma—who to choose as heir apparent and whether to vacate the throne – and are advised by a clairvoyant prognosticator, either Liu Ji or Cheng Ji, who reveals heaven’s will and testifies to the limits of human agency to alter fate. The advisors serve as interlocutors between the emperor and tian. In the end, the powerful monarchs become compliant supplicants who carry out a thoughtful engagement with tian as the other.
RONGQIAN MA, University of Pittsburgh
Rethinking “Kaoju”: A Study of Qian Zhongshu’s (1910-1998) Critical Thoughts on Classical Chinese Poetry
“Kaoju,” focusing on the aspects of phonology, exegetics, and philology in a literary text, became a dominant analytical approach to the study of classical texts in the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). However, towards the end of the Qing period, especially after the May Fourth Movement in 1919, scholars began to develop various alternative approaches to reexamine traditional scholarship; Qian Zhongshu was one of them. This paper focuses on Qian Zhongshu’s rethinking of “kaoju” through his critical thoughts on classical Chinese poetry. Unlike kaoju scholars who mostly treated poetry as canonical texts (jing) and concentrated on their literal meaning and references, Qian pointed out that classical poetry could also be approached in depth from a literary perspective. To illustrate his ideas, I will mainly draw on his comments on Shijing and Song dynasty poetry, which are mostly revealed in his critical monographs Guanzhui Bian (Anthology of Limited Views) and Songshi Xuanzhu (An Annotated Anthology of Selected Song Poetry). Finally, I will conclude my discussion with some reflections on the possible relationship between Qian’s poetic criticism and his long-standing exposure to western literary scholarship.
CECILE CHU-CHIN SUN, University of Pittsburgh
Critiquing Two Critical Notions in Wang Guowei’s Renjian Cihua (Talks on Ci in the Human World): “Poetry With I” and “Poetry Without I”
Wang Guowei’s influential book on poetry, Renjian Cihua, is a supreme example of how traditional Chinese poetry criticism is re-examined by introducing a predominantly Western critical approach during the late Qing and early Republic era when Chinese culture began to be seriously exposed to Western influences. I propose to reexamine two of the most popular notions in the book: “Poetry With I” and “Poetry Without I”. My critique involves two issues. One relates to Wang’s own critical stance implied in these two critical notions. John Keats’s concept of “negative capability” will be discussed to elucidate Wang’s rather naïve and erroneous reception of Western critical views. The other issue relates to the almost unanimously laudatory, but fundamentally unthinking reception of these two notions in Wang’s book since its publication. Regarding this phenomena, we ask: Why? Are we better today?