In the Library

Self Portrait by Ellen Carey, 1986

After working in the morning on my Fulbright personal statement, I spent a bit of time polishing up the assignments portion of my syllabus. Still to schedule: a lecture on art and a class day at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Later, I spent the afternoon at Wilson doing a bit of inspectional reading.

Fuchs, Miriam, and Craig Howes, editors. Teaching Life Writing Texts. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008.

This volume is a dense package of allusions to material I need to catch up on; use it mostly as a bibliographical guide, with occasional insights that require some chewing over. Karpinsky, for example observes students "investing in" the autobiographical pact in the course of the class. This happens when they see Jacques Pepin go from estranged to delighted at his childhood circumstances (p. 288), but just how this happens is far from clear -- before criticizing further I will go back to Lejeune.

Fong, Grace S. "Writing Self and Writing Lives: Shen Shanbao's (1808-1862) Gendered Auto/biographical Practices." NAN NÜ: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 2.2 (2000): 259-303

Opening of Shen Shanbao's collection Hongxuelou shixuan chuji (1836)

Grace Fong briefly quotes Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, theorists who feature prominently in Teaching Life Writing Texts, to justify a project that finds a kind of shadow autobiography written in and around poems in the collections of one particularly brilliant Hangzhou lady. I'm afraid Fong's article is too massive and comes with an argument that is a bit too subtle for my undergraduate class, but it does give me an idea of what I will assign in the class. I will do either one or two (probably one) sessions on the various biographies of the Hangzhou ladies, and their male patrons, and some poetry will make it onto the reading list. I'll have to simplify Fong's somewhat subtle point that autobiography and writing oneself into a group of women are key features of Shen Shanbao's poetry collection.

Fong, Grace. "Inscribing a Sense of Self in Mother's Family: Hong Liangji's (1746-1809) Memoir and Poetry of Remembrance." Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 27, (Dec., 2005), pp. 33-58.

Hong Liangji 洪亮吉

Fong reports, "To varying degrees, Hong's sense of self is conveyed most strongly through memories of his contacts and interactions with particular individuals in the framework of family and community." It strikes me that Hong resembles both Tao Qian and Shen Fu in this respect, and may serve as a bridge between my lectures on these two figures.