Literature and Cultural History

of Early Modern East Asia Workshop

 

This workshop aims to explore the cross-disciplinary and transregional understanding of literature and cultural history in early modern East Asia.  In close relation with other disciplines such as art, religion, and philosophy, we will examine the literary and cultural representations and practices that emerged over the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries.  In this period, people, things, and ideas were vigorously transmitted beyond national borders; Ming-Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and Choson Korea were not isolated entities but actively interacted with each other.  While focusing on the flow of cultural productions and ideas across regional boundaries, we will also discuss theoretical and historical issues such as gender and sexuality, performance and popular culture, literati and self-representation, book publishing and print culture, and the interactions between text and image in expressions of this period.

To join our mailing list, please click here.

For further information, or if you require assistance of any kind, please contact Rivi Handler-Spitz at rivihs@uchicago.edu

 

Spring Schedule 2008

 

 

Friday June 6, 2008, 4:30-6:00 PM in Cobb 304

Professor Amy Stanley of Northwestern University will present a paper entitled

“Traversing the Floating World: Prostitution and Mobility in Tokugawa Japan”

No paper will be pre-circulated for this talk.

 

 

Previous Workshops

 

Friday April 11, 2008, 5:00-6:30 PM, Cobb116

Lin Hsueh-yi, graduate student in East Asian Studies at Princeton University will present a paper entitled:

To Have or Not to Have the Queue?:  Shifting Cultural-Political Identities of the Han Chinese from the Mid-Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Century

To download the paper, please click here.

 

ABSTRACT:

In 1644, when the Manchu regent Dorgon entered the Forbidden City in Beijing and established Qing rule (1644-1912), he immediately gave the order that all Han Chinese males must adopt the Manchu hairstyle by shaving the forehead (tifa).  Since the Manchu hairstyle differed from the Han custom, this order was resisted with great defiance.  The Manchu prince had to revoke the order of shaving the forehead, or the Queue Order.  Only after the Qing empire consolidated China proper was the Queue Order re-enforced.  The same Manchu hairstyle, in nearly three hundred years, became an issue again for Han Chinese literati in the early twentieth century—ironically, this time, many of them struggled to keep it.

 

The first part of my examination is an analysis of how hairstyle served as a cultural marker of different ethnicities, namely the xia/yi distinction, in ancient Chinese texts, and how non-Han hairstyles were received in the seventeenth century in different contexts.  In the second part, I study different attitudes associated with the queue during the turn of the twentieth century, and seek to explain their implications.  The final part is a further study of another government regulation regarding the hairstyle, namely cutting the queue, in the twentieth century.  By contrasting the attitudes toward the queue, a Manchu hairstyle, in the mid-seventeenth century and early twentieth century among Han Chinese literati, I explore how the Manchu consolidation reshaped the cultural-political identity of the Han Chinese, rendering the queue not only a “national” but also a “traditional” hairstyle.  Further, by investigating the history of the queue in China proper and different attitudes associated with the queue, I also analyze how this cultural symbol served as a token of subjugation and at times a sign of humiliation during cross-cultural encounters.  I also expound how attitudes toward the queue corresponded with the changing political reality.  This study, in my view, will also shed new light on the “otherness” of the Manchu rule in the Han Chinese perception, and have a more critical examination of the Han mentality.

 

Monday May 12, 2008, 4:30-6:00 PM in Cobb 304

Professor Ann Waltner of the University of Minnesota will present a paper entitled

“Letters from an Immortal: Tanyanzi in her Own Words”

 

 

 

Winter 2008

 

 

Friday January 11, 2008

Time: 4:30-6:00 PM

Place: Cobb 116

Xu Dongfeng, graduate student in comparative literature, will present a paper on sixteenth century Jesuits in China

Title: “Missionaries and Sino-Centrism: the Subject of Hospitality”

 

Friday January 18, 2008

Time: 4:00-5:30 PM

Place: Cochran Woods Art Center, Room 152

Seunghye Lee, graduate student in art history, will present a paper on Chinese Buddhist painting

Title: The Nanzhao tuzhuan (Illustrated Tale of Nanzhao Kingdom) Revisited

 

Abstract:

This study investigates the Nanzhao tuzhuan 南詔圖傳 or Illustrated Tale of Nanzhao Kingdom, one of the celebrated artworks from present-day Yunnan, the southwest frontier of China. The Nanzhao tuzhuan, at present, consists of a text and picture scrolls. In the text scroll, the two compilers Zhang Shun 張順and Wang Fengzong 王奉宗, wrote that the work was executed in 899 by command of the Emperor Shunhuazhen 舜化貞 (r. 897-902) of the Nanzhao Kingdom. However, according to a long preface to the picture roll written by Zhang Zhao 張照 in 1727, the present work is a copy executed in 945 under the Dali Kingdom.

This earliest dated Buddhist painting from Yunnan has been noted for two main reasons.  First, both the picture and the text scrolls provide plentiful but seemingly confusing accounts on the introduction of Buddhism into the region by the fanseng 梵僧or “Brahman monk.” It is couched within a larger narrative recounting how Nanzhao was legitimized. Second, the scrolls describe the legendary origin of the Acuoye Guanyin image, which was served as the most powerful tutelary god of successive monarchies in Yunnan.  In the picture scroll, the Chinese-looking Brahman monk and the purported to be indigenous but obviously imported icon are represented as the manifestations of the same bodhisattva, Acuoye Guanyin. Visually, these two images point to radically different places of origin. As a result, scholars have been mainly concerned with the historical identity of the Brahman monk, the origin of the Guanyin icon, and the route through which the icon was transmitted to Yunnan. The general conclusion is that the Brahman monk and the Guanyin image were created and united to serve politics. Although this conclusion is not entirely wrong, it dismisses abundant visual and religious implications inherent in the scrolls themselves.

I believe that we should reconsider the Nanzhao tuzhuan as a collection of Buddhist miracle tales in a pictorial format. The subject matter of this set of two scrolls, in fact, belongs to a genre of Chinese Buddhist writing known as the “record of miraculous response,” or “miracle tale.” In fact, the Nanzhao tuzhuan is replete with the illustrations of divine intervention in times of need, the efficacy of Buddhist piety, the spiritually portent Buddhist image, and the miracles associated with the supernatural monk. In his study of Chinese Buddhist miracle tales, Donald Gjertson suggests that the compilers as well as the readers of these miracles seem to have considered them to be factual accounts of events that actually took place. Based on this observation, the present discussion proposes that the compilers’ choice of this literary genre was an essential element in uniting the Brahman monk and the Acuoye Guanyin icon as well as making the Nanzhao tuzhuan effective for propagating the Nanzhao court’s political legitimacy.

In an attempt to prove this hypothesis, the study first explores the early history of Chinese Buddhist miracle tale tradition, and defines the historical position of the Nanzhao tuzhuan within this tradition. The second section will examine the pictorial representations of two main images, the Brahman monk and the Guanyin effigy, in the Nanzhao tuzhuan in close relation to historical personages that also appear on both scrolls. This examination will help to situate the Brahman monk and the Guanyin effigy within the history of Yunnanese Buddhism. The third section considers the role of medieval Chinese Buddhism in creating the Brahman monk as a local Buddhist saint and in transforming the imported icon into an indigenous one in Yunnan. The concepts of the spiritual resonance and the miraculous image will be employed to trace the shaping of the Brahman monk’s identity and the domesticating of the imported Guanyin icon as the conferrer of political legitimacy for successive local monarchies.

 

Co-sponsor with the Visual and Material Perspectives on Early Modern East Asia Workshop

 

 

Friday January 25, 2008

Time: 4:30-6:00 PM

Place: Cobb 116

Catherine Stuer, graduate student in art history will present a paper entitled

Title: “Traces of the Past in Jinling, 1909”

 

          Abstract:

In this study, I follow a lineage of visual representations of Jinling's cityscape, through its transmission from the end of the Ming to the end of the Qing dynasty. This inquiry invites us to rethink our present understanding of the commemorative genre of huaigu in terms of its articulation of deep structures of the experience of the past in China, by investigating its counterpart – the traces of the past that elicit such retrospective vision. Undoubtedly the archetypal subject of huaigu commemoration, Jinling's sites contain multi-layered traces of the past, and as this discussion suggests, the experience of the temporality of these sites was not impervious to change. In fact, it seems to me that within the experience of disjuncture and re-definition of time in its remains, the 'Past' as such takes on more than one modality of existence, and the past/present relation constructed in these sites fluctuates. Interestingly, in a genre of landscape imagery, so-called topographical pictures, that has often been (dis)regarded as commercial in function and derivative in content, a site for inspection is disclosed, both of changes in the representation of past-in-place, as well as of huaigu-responses to such sites, occasionally surviving in accompanying inscriptions.

 

 

Friday February 1st, 2008

Time: 2:30-4:30 PM

Place: Cobb 106

Suyoung Son, graduate student in East Asian studies, will deliver a mock job talk entitled

Writing for Print: Production and Circulation of Literati-Publishing in Seventeenth-Century China

 

Thursday February 21, 2008, a day of sinological sensations: a double feature!

 

David Der-Wei Wang

Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese literature at Harvard University, will give a talk entitled

The Lyrical in Epic Time: The Music and Poetry of Jiang Wenye

 

 

Time: 3:30-5:00

Place: Social Science Tea Room, SS201

 

Abstract:

Jiang Wenye (1910-1983) was one of the most talented composers in modern China and Japan.  He was also known for his poetic works in both Chinese and Japanese.  Born in Taiwan and educated in China and Japan, Jiang belonged to the generation of Taiwanese artists who struggled to negotiate their identities and respond to multiple challenges from colonialism to imperialism, and from nationalism to cosmopolitanism. Although inspired by such modernists as Debussy, Bartok, and Stravinsky, Jiang found in the Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977) a kindred spirit, and when the latter called for sonic representations of national style, he began a life-long endeavor to modernize Chinese music.

Jiang moved from Japan to China in 1938 and his career climaxed in the early 40’s. With his symphony “Confucian Rites” and poetic pieces, Jiang sought to redefine modern Chinese musicality in light of the ancient melodies which he believed were crystallized in the Confucian practice of ritual and music. As such Jiang’s project appears to be an intriguing mixture of the past and the present, a bold invention in a mode of  imaginary nostalgia.  But Jiang’s experiment took place at a time of war, revolution, and atrocity. This trumpeting of his lyrical reconstruction of Chinese civilization was so out of tune with the contemporary “call to arms” that he was doomed to pay an enormous price for his beliefs.

Jaroslav Průšek describes the cultural dynamics of modern China in terms of “the lyrical versus the epic”.  Inspired by Průšek’s notion, this essay deals with the artistic choices Jiang Wenye made and the political objections he had to cope with. Using select musical pieces, poetic works, and theoretical treatises as examples, this essay explores the following issues: how Jiang’s modernist sensibility demonstrated his colonial and cosmopolitan bearings; how his engagement with Confucian musicology brought about an unlikely dialogue between Chinese cultural essentialism and Japanese pan-Asianism; and most important, how his lyrical vision was occasioned by, and confined to, historical contingencies. Because of the contested forces his works and life brought into play, the essay concludes, Jiang Wenye dramatizes the composition of Chinese modernity at its most treacherous. 

This talk is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.

                 

 

and on the very same day .... Thursday, Feb 21, 2008

 

 

Timothy Brook

Principal, St. John’s College, University of British Columbia, and Professor of Chinese history at the University of British Columbia and at Oxford University will give a talk & lead a discussion based on his new book

Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World.

Envisioning the World: The Sino-European Transformation of

 Mappae Mundi in the 17th Century

 

Time: 5:30-7:00 PM

Place: Social Science Tea Room, SS 201

  

Please join us for dinner following the workshop.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies, the Early Modern Workshop, the East Asia Trans-Regional Histories Workshop, and the Renaissance Workshop.

 

 

Friday March 7, 2008

Time: 4:30-6:00 PM

Place: Cobb 101

Ni Zhange (Nicole Ni), graduate student the divinity school

Title: Resurrection, Reincarnation, and Rebirth in the Koshinto Cosmos of Shūsaku Endō’s Deep River

To download the paper, please click here.

 

Fall 2007

 

Thursday October 4, 2007, 4:00-5:30pm, Special Collections Seminar Room, Regenstein Library

Soren Edgren, East Asian bibliographer, Princeton University, presents

Berthold Laufer and the Schiff Expedition to China, 1901-1904

Co-sponsor with the Center for East Asian Studies

 

ABSTRACT: This paper describes the little known activities of the German scholar Berthold Laufer (1874-1934) in China between 1901 and 1904, when he led the Jacob H. Schiff Expedition on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Laufer was a remarkable scholar and an exceptional personality of his generation. He is best known today for the period he spent at the Field Museum in Chicago from 1907 until his untimely death in 1934. During that time he published many books and scholarly articles. Nevertheless, it is the decade of activity of Laufer’s career before going to Chicago that illustrates important features of his scholarly methodology, which also can help us to understand his personal character. The results of Laufer’s work between 1898 and 1907 will be discussed, with particular attention paid to his three-year sojourn in China. The primary sources for assessing Laufer’s time in China are his voluminous exchange of correspondence with his mentor, Franz Boas (1858-1942), in New York, and his own detailed field notes from the expedition. 

 
 
Friday October 12,  4:00-6:00pm, CWAC 152
Jeehee Hong, graduate student in art history will present a chapter of her dissertation
Staging Death and Life: Five Actor Figurines and a Miniature Theater from Houma Tomb No. 1, Shanxi Province
(Co-sponsor with VMPEA)
 

ABSTRACT:  My dissertation, “Theatricalizing Death: Performance Images of Mid-imperial China in Mortuary Contexts (11th-13th centuries),” examines the ways in which specific theatricality, generated through images representing theatrical performances, reveals contemporaneous views and attitudes towards death during the 11th to 13th century China. The dissertation suggests that the meanings and functions of the representations of performances go beyond a simple reflection of the blooming theater culture of the time. Formulated through contemporaries’ actual theatrical experiences and particular representational processes of the prototypes, the visual theatricality articulated in such representations served not only to objectify the notion of death as a counterpart of their lives, but also to configure the relationship between the worlds of the living and the dead in intensely social terms.

This talk will focus on Chapter II of the dissertation, in which I closely examine Tomb No.1 of the burials of the Dong 董brothers, buried in 1210 in Houma 侯馬, Shanxi 山西Province, during the Jin 金dynasty (1115-1234). Five miniature figurines of actors were found on a ledge in the north wall, set just above the brick reliefs representing the tomb occupants. Although scholars have generally considered these actor figurines as an extension of traditional images of entertainment in tomb space, two significant visual and spatial clues imply more complex meanings and functions. First, the trajectory of the performance image from relief to free-standing figurine marks a desire for heightened animation in representing a theatrical performance. Such liveliness in the actor representation distinguishes them from the other images in the tomb, which appear relatively flat as bas-relief. The first part of this talk will explore this visual distinction within conceptual and historical contexts. Second, the location of the actor figurines in the tomb space implies a newly acquired symbolic status. Located directly above the image of the tomb occupants on the back (north) wall, the actor figurines assume no spectatorship by the represented occupants. In order to understand the logic behind such an unusual placement, it is important to recognize the traditional symbolism of the back wall as associated with the “gate” for the dead. By interrogating the distinctive form of the actors and theater, and contextualizing the position of the actor figurines within the rubric of traditional symbolism, I will explore a particular sense of theatricality conveyed by the image of actors and stage. The visual and conceptual logics of the theatricality will help reveal a specific vision of death and life of the time.

 

 
 
Friday October 26, 1:30-2:50, Judd Hall 313
Zhu Qiang 朱强, Deputy Director of Peking University Library
“An Overview of Chinese Electronic Databases and Digitization Projects for Scholarly Resources”

Talk will be given in Chinese with English outline on PowerPoint

(Co-sponsor with the Center for East Asian Studies and the East Asian division of Regenstein Library)

 

 

ABSTRACT:  Mr. Zhu is not only a senior librarian in one of the most renowned Chinese Universities but also one of the founding librarians and designers for China Academic Digital Library and System (CADLIS), a project aimed to digitize various special collections held in many academic libraries and provide e-resource services to its member libraries. The project has been joined by more than 300 top-notch Chinese academic libraries and funded by China’s Ministry of Education. In his talk, Mr. Zhu will give a broad introduction to the major electronic recourses available on China’s market as well as many digital resources developed by various non-commercial endeavors, which are much less known but contain many important scholarly resources. 

 
 
Friday October 26, 3:30-5:00pm, Cobb, 106
Stephen West, Professor of Chinese Literature at Arizona State University

“Speaking Stones: Landscape, Text, and Memory in Lou Yue's Writing  in Henan”

 
 
Friday November 16th, 4:00-5:30, CWAC 152
Julia Orell, graduate student in Chinese art history
“Depicting the Yangzi River: Particular Landscapes in Song China” (dissertation proposal)

(Co-sponsor with the Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia workshop)

 

ABSTRACT:  This dissertation will investigate the depiction of particular places in landscape painting with a focus on representations of the Yangzi River as part of a larger discourse about place and region during the Song dynasty (960-1279). The focus is on two late Southern Song handscrolls in the collection of the Freer Gallery, 'Ten Thousand Miles of the Yangzi River’ (formerly attributed to Juran) and 'Shu River' (formerly attributed to Li Gonglin). The dissertation explores the historical significance of the Yangzi River as subject matter and investigates how landscape painting interacts with other cultural practices, especially travel writing and historical-geographical writing, in constructing images of the region.

 

Spring 2007

 

 

 

Friday May 4, 2007, 4:30-6:30pm, Cobb 101

Richard Von Glahn, Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, presents “The Making of a Daoist Saint: Sa Shoujian in Yuan-Ming Hagiography, Drama, and Fiction.”

 

Thursday May 10, 2007, 4-6pm, Cobb 302

Bruce Rusk, Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University, will present “Forgery and Connoisseurship of Ming Bronzes.”

Friday May 18, 2007, 4-6pm, Cobb 101
Rachel Kunze, a PhD student in the EALC department, presents “Trading Bulls for Gold: The Family Melodrama (Strategies of National Narrative in Contemporary “Traditional” Ping Opera).”

Friday May 25, 2007, Cochrane-Woods Art Center Room 152
In a joint session with the Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia workshop, Catherine Stuer, PhD student in the department of Art History, will make a presentation.  Title TBA.

Friday June 1 2007, (Time and place TBA)
Mei Mei, a PhD student in the EALC department, will make a presentation.  Title TBA. 

 

Friday Apr 20, 2007, 4-6pm, Gender Studies 1st floor Conference room (5733 S. University Ave)

Fumiko Jōo, a PhD student in the EALC department, will present a draft of her dissertation proposal titled “The Peony Lantern and Fantastic Tales in Late Imperial China and Tokugawa Japan: Local History, Religion and Gender.”

 

April 13th 2007, at 4:30pm, in Cochrane-Woods Art Center

In a joint session with the Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia workshop, Yuhang Li, graduate student in the East Asian Languages & Civilizations department, will present her dissertation proposal titled “Gendered Materialization: An Investigation of Late Imperial Women’s Self-Fashioning through Artistic and Literary Reproductions of Guanyin.”

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