Paul Hsiang Lecture Series on Chinese Poetry

The Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經) is the earliest surviving anthology of Chinese poetry, whose contents mostly date to the Zhou dynasty (1045–221 BCE), but it contains many works of interest to modern readers. In particular, many of the poems in the anthology are love songs, composed in both male and female voices, evoking visceral emotions such as jealousy, loneliness, anger, and longing. In premodern China the anthology was normally read in tandem with several traditional commentaries, which interpreted the poems of love and longing in terms of Confucian concepts of ritual and propriety. Modern scholars, however, have frequently criticized this tradition and asserted that these poems are simply innocent love songs without any moral import. Though this dispute may seem to be one of literary interpretation (hermeneutics), it is also grounded in moral and political assumptions that deserve scrutiny. After all, the Confucian commentators were not wrong to think that love and desire are matters of profound sociopolitical significance. Rather than choosing between straightforward love songs or moralizing allegory, the poems are engaged in both domains at once; they revolve around dynamic oppositions of sexual desire and sexual constraint, ritual propriety and ritual violation, innocence admired and innocence abused. Early commentaries, though erring on some details, remain a valuable guide to the way that these poems engage with multiple dimensions of ancient Chinese culture. 

Speaker: Nicholas Morrow Williams studies and translates classical Chinese poetry. His work examines its significance in light of multiple disciplines, including religious studies, linguistics, translationstudies, and Sino-Japanese comparative literature. His publications include Elegies of Chu: An Anthology of Early Chinese Poetry (Oxford World’s Classics, 2022) and thirty-five articles and book chapters. He is Associate Professor of Chinese literature at Arizona State University, and also Faculty Head of the East and Southeast Asia section in the School of International Languages and Cultures there.

Date: October 10, 2024, 4:00 P.M. - 5:30 P.M. 

This study proposes a comparative approach to lyric poems by Chinese and British women writers from the mid-17th century to the mid-18th century based on their everydayness. It aims to investigate what is said in their poems, how it is said and why. It is also devoted to examining how these poems interact with and reconstruct existing institutions and transform norms. It explores how new knowledge is generated when a text is read against its counterparts from a different social and cultural context by today’s readers with our stereotypes and biases. The comparison based on everydayness neither implies an ontological historical realism nor aims to reinforce the boundaries of social and cultural narratives of the two geographical regions. Rather, it challenges ethnocentric readings of cultural products and strives to acknowledge how alterity in any seemingly homogeneous communities paradoxically reveals commonalities of human experiences and conditions. In the process, we hope to discover the unknown and question existing boundaries when we acknowledge everydayness as the core of humanity. 

Speaker: Haihong Yang is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Delaware.

Date: November 5, 2021, 4:30 P.M. -6:00 P.M.

In "Rhapsody on Literature" 文賦, Lu Ji 陸機 (261-303) expounds his thoughts on the creative act, raising thorny questions about reading and writing, originality and heritage. Throughout this grand work of meta-literature, he concedes a dread of inadvertently imitating or duplicating a prior work, all the while insisting that reading immersively  is a prerequisite for writing. More curiously, his own literary practice appears paradoxical: most of Lu Ji's extant poems are imitative practices. For a writer who insists on creating distinctions from prior works, explicit imitations of well-known examples might be the last undertaking modern readers would expect of him. This raises a cluster of questions: how do the anxiety of influence, the inevitability of referentiality, and the (re)composition of existing materials figure in the creative process? To address these questions, my lecture will examine Lu Ji's practice of literary imitation in light of his theory of literary creativity.

Speaker: Wendy Swartz is the Department Chair and Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Rutgers-New Brunswick

Date: May 6, 2021, 3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M. 

Speaker: Joseph Dennis is the Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  

Date: April 5, 2019, 4:30 P.M. - 6:00 P.M.