From Confucian classics to science fictions, traditional and modern China developed sophisticated mechanisms to define and describe the human. Humans are defined in contrast to the bestial; living humans transform to dead bodies; and in reincarnation stories, humans mutate into various forms of existence. Studies of Chinese literature usually understand the human as an expressive subject. This session provides different perspectives by exploring the normative human and its transitions and transformations throughout Chinese history. Our papers move from the normative person in early China to the individual person in late imperial China, and then to transformations of human forms in modern China.

Xiaowen Xu’s paper discusses the formulation of normality through describing the abnormal in an early work Shanhai jing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas). The Classic of Mountains and Seas was compiled in the 4^th century and has been considered a collection of mythic geography and bestiary. Its record of a variety of “human beings,” however, implies the holistic concept of normality in early China. The paper explores the discourse in the texts in four volumes on the Greater Wilderness (Dahuang) in Shanhai jing and to analyze how the “abnormal” is defined by either “lacking” or “having too many” in the regions that are named as “the greater wilderness”. It is argued in the brief but discursive narratives of a series of abnormal “human beings” in the four directions of the Greater Wilderness a sense of normality for privileged human beings is established. The concept of holistic normality for a human being is revealed to be not only at center of a hierarchical definition of geography, but also expressive of its propriety to what appears to be already included in the civilization in the China at the 4^th century.

Moving from the normative person to the individual person, Guojun Wang explores the moment of death in traditional Chinese theater (13^th-17^th centuries). Whereas in Shakespearean drama, it is typical for a person to “pronounce” his/her death on stage, traditional Chinese theater developed different ways for a character to “perform” death. The paper focuses on two aspects in those theatrical works: the moment of death and the bodies after death. Rather than an end to a character, the moment of death reconfigures the relationship between words, body, and the theatrical setting. The moment of death, the paper suggests, offers a unique opportunity to conflate the theatrical and social realms engendered by a play. By placing the Chinese case in comparative perspectives, the paper delineates the modalities of differentiating between the living and the dead––an important aspect in defining the human in traditional China.

Toward modern China, the introduction of Western science and literary tradition offered ever more venues to explore normality and abnormality of a human being. Renren Yang explores the mutational logic by comparing a classical Chinese romance The Story of the Stone (Hongloumeng, 1792) and its 20th-century sequel New Story of the Stone (Xin shitouji, 1905-08) by Wu Jianren’s (1866-1910). This novel unravels a series of tensions between human and non-human, biology and technology, religion and science, and real and virtual, which lends itself to a posthumanist reading. By exploring the frequent and random digressions of the protagonist’s route, the paper suggests that mutations are not external randomness imposed onto the fictional world but are always immanent, and the human is always “in the pass, in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms” with the things, words, and social beings of the world (Bruno Latour). This posthumanist reading bespeaks Wu Jianren’s diagnosis of the ongoing mutation within Chinese society and his envisioning of the "desirable abnormal" for modern China at the turn of the twentieth century.

As our papers demonstrate, from early to modern China, the human is always defined in relation to its alternatives––either the non-human or the abnormal forms of existence. Together, our papers show that quasi-historical, theatrical, and fictional writings provide multifaceted perspectives to understand humanness in a millennia-long literary tradition.

The presider will introduce the panel briefly, and each presenter will have 15 minutes to present their papers. There will be 20 minutes of unstructured discussion time in the format of question and answer open to the audience at the end of the panel.