First, Frankie Hin Ming Chik inspects the imperialistic effects of the term “literature” on our understanding of early Chinese “classics” (jing). He bases his analysis on two imperial bibliographic treatises—the “Yiwen zhi” of the Hanshu and the “Jingji zhi” of the Suishu—that developed a classification system that divides all traditional texts into six or four categories spearheaded by the division of “classics.” Modern scholars have repeatedly ignored these traditional systems of knowledge and approached pre-modern Chinese texts in accordance with modern-day systems of knowledge organization, which led to a termination of the textual hierarchies that the “Yiwen zhi” and the “Jingji zhi” create. In this paper, Frankie therefore queries how modern-day categories like “literature” change our directions of research and how the “classics” may be studied innovatively in modern times without falling risk of appropriating and squeezing texts like the jing into modern classification systems? By focusing on the Shijing (Classic of Song), a classical anthology of works which we call poems, he showcases that the modern reclassification of “classics” into refined literature obscures imperial interferences in the formation of knowledge in traditional China.
In the second presentation, Thomas Mazanec explores the methodological pitfalls of lyricism and the affective-expressive lyrical paradigm. He argues that this product of German Romanticism and its inheritors maps poorly onto indigenous Chinese visions of poetry during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Looking at poetry manuals and literary paratexts, he shows how the key terms debated by contemporaneous poets and theorists such as “goal” (zhi) and “cast of mind” (yi) were broader than subjective emotion since they included transpersonal experiences and internalized systems of figuration. Moreover, when personal emotion is brought into these discussions, it is often mentioned as a hindrance to poetry. Good poetry should transcend or at least regulate emotion, not indulge in it. Some went so far as to suggest that writing poetry was continuous with other forms of intense mental concentration, such as Buddhist meditation or shamanistic spirit roaming practices which required the stilling of emotion, precisely the opposite of lyrical expression. Hence, he argues that a projection of lyricist ideals onto the medieval Chinese context clouds rather than illuminates our understanding of these pre-Romantic discourses on the power and function of poetry during the Tang.
In the third contribution, Kristin Scheible rethinks the theorists to whom she and other scholars in the field readily reach when analyzing Pāli vaṃsa (historical chronicle) such as the fifth century Sri Lankan Mahāvaṃsa. In seeking to provide a corrective to the overtly political readings ascertained from the translations of British colonial administrator George Turnour (1837) and German Orientalist Wilhelm Geiger (1912), she has advocated for special attention to be paid to the reading instructions initiating the Mahāvaṃsa. These instructions portend the activated emotional state of the reader/hearer and challenge the impact of the “Protestant presuppositions” in earlier interpretations. Might reliance on the go-to, “new canon” of literary theorists and hermeneutical helpers be a manifestation of discursive imperialism?
Finally, Filippo Marsili engages in the dangers of intercultural dialogues that treat civilizations as moral and ideological unities. Based on the model of Christianity’s adoption by the Roman Empire as its official ideology in the fourth century, recent scholarship projected such visions that postulate a unitary religious or metaphysical view as a fundamental ideological tool of empires onto non-Western cultures. This paper addresses this issue by analyzing the narrative strategies adopted by the authors of early Chinese historiographical writings (especially the Shiji and the Hanshu) as they coped with the expectation that the political unification carried out by the Qin and Han Dynasties (3rd - 2nd centuries BCE) represented the fulfillment of an ideal moral/cosmic order. It argues that despite scholars’ numerous attempts at interpreting Heaven (tian) in light of Abrahamic systemic approaches, ancient Chinese historians were not prone to bend the complexity of THEIR narratives to teleological concerns with theoretical unity and teleological trajectories that apparently guided recent comparativists’ work.