Autobiographical Subjects

Smith, Sidonie, and Watson, Julia. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

p. 48

Memory

(See my last entry)

Experience

When the evidence offered is the evidence of "experience," the claim for referentiality is further buttressed -- what could be truer, after all, than a subject's own account of what he or she has lived through? It is precisely this kind of appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation-as a foundation on which analysis is based that weakens the critical thrust of histories of difference. By remaining within the epistemological frame of orthodox history, these studies lose the possibility of examining those assumptions and practices that excluded considerations of difference in the first place. They take as self-evident the identities of those whose experience is being documented and thus naturalize their difference. They locate resistance outside its discursive construction and reify agency as an inherent attribute of individuals, thus decontextualizing it. When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one's vision is structured-about language (or discourse) and history-are left aside. The evidence of experience then becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what it constitutes who see and act in the world.

"The Evidence of Experience"
Joan W. Scott
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Summer, 1991), pp. 773-797

Identity

"Some models of identity culturally available in the United States over the last three hundred years have included the sinful Puritan seeking signs of salvation, the self-made man, the struggling and suffering soul, the innocent quester, the "bad" girl or boy, the adventurer, and the trickster." -p. 34

While President Obama’sbiracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s
pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. Mrs. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides
said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.

“She is representative of how we have evolved and who we are,” said Edward Ball, a historian who discovered that he had black relatives, the descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors, when he researched his memoir, “Slaves in the Family.”

“We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites and blacks in America,” Mr. Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.” -- The New York Times, October 8, 2009

Embodiment

The rhetoric of the "body" is trendy in feminism; it's interesting to think about how it makes its return to the male-centered world...

Agency

Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso, 1984.

...

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Memory

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Chapter 2, "Autobiographical Subjects"

It's hard to evaluate this book: it mainly seems a rather bland literature review, but one that nevertheless introduces key terms and interesting examples. In place of my typical effort to annotate the argument carefully, I'm going to try taking at least parts of the text in a "commonplace book" mode. This from the first section of chapter 2, devoted to "memory."

Olney on Augustine, Memory and Narrative, 19-21

Silko, Leslie. Storyteller. New York: Arcarde Publishers, Little Brown & Co., 1981.

Engel, Susan. Context Is Everything: the Nature of Memory. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1999.

Wolf, Christa. Patterns of Childhood: (formerly a Model Childhood). New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1984.

Alexie, Sherman. First Indian on the Moon. Brooklyn N.Y.: Hanging Loose Press, 1993.

"communities of memory"

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae. Vibration Cooking, or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.

"an intersubjective phenomenon" mitchell 193 n17

Augustine's pears

Akmatova, A Poem without a Hero

"communities of memory"

Akhmatova, Anna. A Poem Without a Hero. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973. (trauma, conscience) ; Art's ... dead mother, n2 "postmemory"

scriptotherapy

Henke, Suzette. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing. London: Macmillan, 1998.

Fraser, Sylvia. My father's house : a memoir of incest and of healing. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988.

Mairs, Nancy. Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

The "self-absorption" fallacy:

Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Hornbacher, Marya. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. New York NY: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1998.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez: An Autobiography. Boston Mass.: D.R. Godine, 1982.

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Exemplary Ladies

A decent introduction to exemplary ladies, and thus to writing women's lives in China in turn, is Shane McCausland's First Masterpiece of Chinese Painting: The Admonitions Scroll (New York: George Braziller Publishers, 2003)

First there is the following early comment from McCausland, which leads me to the central theme of this lecture: the difficulty of writing a true, as opposed to exemplary, female life.

I'll select two exemplary ladies to examine for this first lecture (we'll return to Concubine Ban, a third, on Friday):

Lady Fan (Fan Ji)

I was able to locate the second part of the Chinese text (after she reforms him from hunting by going on hunger strike) in a translation by Patricia Eberly:

Here is the Chinese text (From Chinapage.com)

　 　 楚 莊 樊 姬
　 　 樊 姬 ， 楚 莊 王 之 夫 人 也 。 莊 王 即 位 ， 好 狩 獵 。 樊 姬
諫 不 止 ， 乃 不 食 禽 獸 之 肉 ， 王 改 過 ， 勤 於 政 事 。 王 嘗 聽
朝 罷 晏 ， 姬 下 殿 迎 曰 ： 「 何 罷 晏 也 ， 得 無 飢 倦 乎 ？ 」 王
曰 ： 「 與 賢 者 語 ， 不 知 飢 倦 也 。 」 姬 曰 ： 「 王 之 所 謂 賢
者 何 也 ？ 」 曰 ： 「 虞 丘 子 也 。 」 姬 掩 口 而 笑 ， 王 曰 ：「

姬 之 所 笑 何 也 ？ 」 曰 ： 「 虞 丘 子 賢 則 賢 矣 ， 未 忠 也 。
」 王 曰 ： 「 何 謂 也 ？ 」 對 曰 ： 「 妾 執 巾 櫛 十 一 年 ， 遣 人
之 鄭 衛 ， 求 美 人 進 於 王 。 今 賢 於 妾 者 二 人 ， 同 列 者 七 人
。 妾 豈 不 欲 擅 王 之 愛 寵 哉 ！ 妾 聞 『 堂 上 兼 女 ， 所 以 觀 人
能 也 。 』 妾 不 能 以 私 蔽 公 ， 欲 王 多 見 知 人 能 也 。 今 虞 丘
子 相 楚 十 餘 年 ， 所 薦 非 子 弟 ， 則 族 昆 弟 ， 未 聞 進 賢 退 不
肖 ， 是 蔽 君 而 塞 賢 路 。 知 賢 不 進 ， 是 不 忠 ； 不 知 其 賢 ，
是 不 智 也 。 妾 之 所 笑 ， 不 亦 可 乎 ！ 」 王 悅 。 明 日 ， 王 以
姬 言 告 虞 丘 子 ， 丘 子 避 席 ， 不 知 所 對 。 於 是 避 舍 ， 使 人
迎 孫 叔 敖 而 進 之 ， 王 以 為 令 尹 。 治 楚 三 年 ， 而 莊 王 以 霸
。 楚 史 書 曰 ： 「 莊 王 之 霸 ， 樊 姬 之 力 也 。 」 詩 曰 ： 「 大
夫 夙 退 ， 無 使 君 勞 。 」 其 君 者 ， 謂 女 君 也 。 又 曰 ： 「 溫
恭 朝 夕 ， 執 事 有 恪 。 」 此 之 謂 也 。

　 　 頌 曰 ： 樊 姬 謙 讓 ， 靡 有 嫉 妒 ， 薦 進 美 人 ， 與 己 同
處 ， 非 刺 虞 丘 ， 蔽 賢 之 路 ， 楚 莊 用 焉 ， 功 業 遂 伯 。

Lady Feng

Lady Fu's low character is revealed:

McCausland makes reads the painting very perceptively:

I really like how McCausland includes other paintings with this theme; it displays the staying power, and the unfortunate woodenness of the "exemplary" life, very effectively.

One more:

McCausland translates part of the Chinese text, which is a much longer and not actually in the Biographies of Eminent Ladies:

The Chinese text of the story (from Wikisource)

建昭中，上幸虎圈鬥獸，後宮皆坐。熊佚出圈，攀檻欲上殿。左右貴人傅昭儀等皆驚走，馮婕妤直前當熊而立，左右格殺熊。上問：「人情驚懼，何故前當熊？」婕
妤對曰：「猛獸得人而止，妾恐熊至御坐，故以身當之。」元帝嗟歎，以此倍敬重焉。傅昭儀等皆慚。明年夏，馮婕妤男立為信都王，尊婕妤為昭儀。元帝崩，為信
都太后，與王俱居儲元宮。河平中，隨王之國。後徙中山，是為孝王。

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Commonplace Book Begins: Funeral Literature

Example of lei wen, sacrificial memorial writing for funerals

Funerary Writing

What follows is a set of reading and lecture notes and excerpts that I was inspired to begin producing after starting A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) by W.H. Auden. The concept of the "commonplace book" thrills me because it is so much like the best that blogging can be : a sharing of experience, grounded in the written word.

Davis, Albert. T'ao Yüan-Ming: His Works and Their Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

This...chapter contains a cautionary piece, addressed to his sons, and three sacrificial pieces, including the particularly famous In Sacrifice for Myself. All fall within the category of private, family writings, but it is probably necessary to realize that a growing tradition of publication would tend to make a writer who was conscious of literary success aware that initially private writings were likely to reach a wider audience. It was surely this literary self-consciousness that moved Tao to write such a work as In Sacrifice for Myself. From the outset he was presumably addressing those beyond the immediate circle of relatives and friends. (Davis, p. 225)

For the 'cautionary piece,' Davis cites the possible example of To My Son I-en by Zheng Xuan (127-200):

Tao Qian's equivalent admonition to his sons is filled with much more tension because Tao has chosen such a different path for his life. His values are remarkably different from Zheng Xuan's; one wonders by the end of his words whether he would rather his sons also follow their own path, or try for a more conforming and comfortable lifestyle:

I gave the tension here as the reason why I particularly wanted them to see this piece to Tao Qian's sons. Family was important to him, I emphasized. I turned to the piece "In Sacrifice for My Sister Madame Cheng" to show that Tao Qian was anything but a man living a world consisting of just himself and nature. Unexpectedly, I found myself dwelling on the lines at the end of the opening section:

"Stroking your hair, I grew up with you." I'm always particularly moved by that line, and I think I said in class, "This is how a guy in ancient China learned...to be nice. To show affection to another human being. It is a building block of himself, a value learned in his own personal experience. And it shows beautifully that this eulogy or any eulogy is in part autobiographical." I may have put things better than that -- or perhaps not.

Saving the best for last is not always the best policy -- I ran out of time before I could read much of "In Sacrifice for Myself." But I think I was able to get across how unusual and how comic it is to have a writer creating his own funerary literature:

Students enjoyed learning the symbolic significance of yellow leaves, traveller's inn and "original home." A question that I must ask myself is, what are the earliest extant use of these metaphors? Isn't it almost certain to be this piece?
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Some New Terms from My Friends

Designing Urban Sustainability

A bout of H1N1-period sickness has lowered my productivity, which admittedly has not been very high lately anyway. This morning, from the confines of my bed I chatted with a friend and fellow PhD student in Hong Kong, and he sent me a sample of his work. It's an inspiration to see actual pieces of dissertation out there and done, complete with headings like "2.0 Info-sociational life & informational cities."

Comments and notes for my own reference:



1. A Point of Rhetoric

At one point my friend defines his "analytical framework" : "the cases of info-sociational life in Hong Kong and Taipei are at the intersection of three key conceptual themes: informational urbanity, or the global information city; urban civil society or associational life; and urban sustainability." There's a diagram to with this:

An Example of Rhetorical Illustration

The illustration is fascinating because it is an impossible level of abstraction, at least as far as I am concerned. I can grasp what is meant: new urban groups are using information tools to advocate for urban sustainability, but the relationship between the three substantives in the sentence I just wrote is already far more complex than that allowed by the Venn diagram, which pictures only logical intersection of sets. In this sense, the figure is only an illustration of the rhetorical usage "intersection."

I'm reminded of the Chinese paper I'm currently translating, which 'proved' a point by asking the reader to understand the ideology of a group in terms of a 'framework' that included 'deep' or 'core' beliefs as opposed to 'surface' beliefs. What struck me at the time was that there was no particular reason to see one thing as 'deep' and another as 'surface.' Indeed, there was no motivation for having this structural relationship at all, other than its convenience as a common convention in Chinese rhetoric. Perhaps at some point a young Chinese graduate student will think to illustrate his point with a diagram showing 'deep,' and 'surface.' If such a practice takes off, many analyses of many points will have the same sort of illustrations.

2. A Point About Story-Telling

The 'meat' of this piece of dissertation is a set of four profiles of four organizations who advance urban sustainability with informational tools. Learning who is involved in these organizations and what they have done is of extreme interest. A brief listing:

Designing Hong Kong. I'm struck right away that this group is comprised of some very rich and successful people.

A Map of Our Own. A really cool site combining urban and oral histories.

Organization of Urban REs. An Obviously well-meaning but hopelessly messy Taiwanese urban renewal site.

Taiwan Environmental Info Center. A news service that reminds me of the Aibai Library; both have excellent web pages.

The author synthesized these 'cases' with great skill in a list of 'tactics' : "advocacy journalism and new media activities; tackling urban planning and development issues; monitoring land use dynamics; protecting community heritage; supporting community identity; and encouraging participation in political and decision-making processes." I love the idea that community development and urban sustainability can bring together story-telling and imaginative policy development. My colleague is certainly a crucial participant in such discussions in that he has collected them here for comparative study.

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Translation: Anti-Fascist Screed

Chiang Kai-shek, Fascist

On the Dual Nature of the Nationalism Advocated by the Nationalist Literary and Arts School

by Qian Zhengang (see my Google docs page for complete translation; the original Chinese has a Google doc as well)

In addition to some more work on the theory of autobiography, I did a bit more translating of this latest paper. The main ideas of the argument in the latter half are:

Chiang Kai-shek, the most important supporter of the Nationalist Literary Movement, was already by 1927 no longer faithful to the Three Principles of the People but rather a devoted follower of Fascism.

Since the Nationalist Literary School took its orders from the Nationalist Literary Movement, no matter what their own ideology was like, for any and all ideology they all could only proceed to propagate Fascism, accepting or further explicating the ideas of their instigator, Chiang Kai-shek.

Well then, why did the Nationalist Literary School also propagate the egalitarian nationalism of Sun Yat-sen in theory and in parts of their works? I believe this is a result of the influence of the authoritative power of Sun Yat-sen's ideology. Sun Yat-sen was once the public leader of each revolutionary class of China; his Three Principles of the People were once the theoretical manifestation of the public will of each revolutionary class of China.

In one area, that accepting the government of Chiang Kai-shek required disseminating Fascism formed the deep nature; in the other area the utter necessity to fulsomely praise the nationalism of Sun Yat-sen formed the surface nature.

This is of course vaguely disturbing to translate, but I like that it has me thinking more about the lives and personalities of people like the author of the paper. Unfortunately the word that comes to mind is 'warped.' Deep feelings of some sort seem to brim just under the surface of this piece, but I can't say exactly what those are. Meanwhile the logic of the argument has the tacky, tired feel of Chinese inner/outer and deep/surface idioms. One thinks of De Francis, Hannis and others who have argued that Chinese language stifles innovation:

As I have elucidated above, for Sun Yat-sen's egalitarianism we should express affirmation, while for ultranationalism wet must steadfastly offer rejection. Well then, how should we distinguish this nationalism possessing a dual nature? The key to the problem lies in making clear the structural relationship of the dual nature, which means we must make clear which nature resides in a deep layer of the structure, and which in a surface layer.

Notably, what "structure" would refer to in real life is left out of the picture, along with any apparent realization that the term "structure" here is an empty abstract, a simple rhetorical tool really meant for no more than to emphasize what is no doubt a very safe point: Fascism is bad, and so is the KMT.

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Next translation: Fascist screed

Where to find the Fascism: Vanguard Monthly, a KMT literary journal

The next translation I'm doing for Nobo contains some interesting information about Fascism among KMT writers in the early 1930s.



In 1933 Chen Xinchun was urging his readers to be more "Like Italy's Mussolini, like Germany's Hitler..." And in 1931, a fairly scary dramatic poem (ju shi) called "The Blood of the Yellow People" by Huang Zhenxia 黄震遐 gives us a vision of racism in the Chinese language. Set in the 13th century from the perspective of the 'yellow' Mongols who had scored a major defeat against the 'white'/'caucasian' Russians, the poem's beginning reads (first draft):

Give up ba, you menial fools, begging for your life,
Die faster ba, why you need to frown so?
Escape ya, crestfallen king of Russia;
Lie down ya, vicious mad dogs of Europa;
Topple ya, fabled high towers of Moscow;
Roll ya, Caucasian heads growing yellow hair;
Horrifying ya, boiling oil for frying corpses;
Frightening ya, rotten skeletons all over, what bad men;
Dead spirits clutching at white maidens embracing with all their might;
Beauties' lovely heads become hideous skeletons;
Savages like wild animals in the palace, combat fierce and mighty;
Knights of the cross, faces blanched with sorrow;
For a thousand years the coffins leach out their vile smells'
Iron heels trampling broken bones the cry of the camels becomes a weird hou;
God has fled, the demons have raised their firey whips of vengeance;
The yellow peril is come! The yellow peril is come!
Brave knights of Asia, show your bloody, man-eating faces.

绝望吧，你们这些哀求饶命的手，

快点死吧，何必多皱眉头？

逃呀，斡罗斯颓靡的王侯；

躲呀，欧罗巴失魂的猛狗；

倾倒呀，莫斯科万重的高楼；

滚呀，高加索人长着黄毛的头；

恐怖呀，煎着尸体的沸油；

可怕呀，遍地的腐骸如何凶丑；

死神捉着白姑娘拼命地搂；

美人螓首变成狰狞的髑髅；

野兽般的生番在故宫里蛮争恶斗；

十字军战士的脸上充满了哀愁；

千年的棺材泄出它凶秽的恶臭；

铁蹄践着断骨骆驼的鸣声变成怪吼；

上帝已逃，魔鬼扬起了火鞭复仇；

黄祸来了！黄祸来了！

亚西亚勇士们张大吃人的血口。

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On Autobiography

One Way for French Theory to Come to America

Lejeune, Philippe and Eakin, Paul John. On Autobiography. Translated by Katerine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.


My continuing, slow efforts at the theory of biography and autobiography took me back to the first Lejeune volume in English, On Autobiography (I've already made one post on the famous essay 'Le Pacte Autobiographique'). I re-read Paul John Eakin's 'foreword' to the volume and for the first time started to get something out of it. A brief report on only the first section (from my notes):

Eakins unpacks the issues of narrative in Lejeune's work as one sign of the divisions between "two Lejeunes" -- two sides of his personality (p. xi-xiii). One Lejeune praises innovation above all things, and so he idealized "a story without narrative" as something really special, but the other Lejeune is a "connoisseur" making fine distinctions among very typically plotted autobiographies. Eakins continues directing us towards Lejeune's personality when he points out how Lejeune perhaps naively bracketed a firm concept of 'sincerity' in his work, but that it was this attention to the necessary modeling of the reader's response that makes Lejeune's theory more representative of the 'self' as we continue to consider it, despite the more contemporary theoretical notion that the 'self' is a fiction:

To read autobiography in the manner of Lejeune, one must be both sophisticated, alive to its imaginative art, and naive, believing in the sincerity of the author's intention to present the story of "a real person concerning his own existence" (p. xiii, quoting p. 4 of the translation)....The interest of Lejeune's position resides in his willingness to concede the fictive status of the self and then to proceed with its functioning as experiential fact (xv).

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Qu Yuan, Visually

Reciting Qu Yuan poems at Double Fifth, the Poet turned Patriot

I'd like to collect here a few images that illustrate how the figure of Qu Yuan was used throughout Chinese history. (A continuing entry)



The Dragon-Boat Festival, also known as 'Double Fifth' festival or duan wu jie, is now often explained as a memorial tribute to Qu Yuan. In 2008, a major celebration activity series in Zigui, Hubei included an assemblage of middle school students to recite Qu Yuan's poetry (they are reciting "Ode to the Orange" 橘颂). (source: Xinhua news)

As David Hawkes so spurnfully points out, however, this tradition was not a product of Qu Yuan's day, but more likely an innovation of the Confucianist 'cult of Qu Yuan' that probably began to develop in the second half of the Han dynasty. The story that dragon boats were launched to save Qu Yuan or scare away the fish, as well as the one that rice and/or rice dumplings (known as zongzi) were thrown into the river to save the corpse of Qu Yuan from the fish (the wikipedia entry on Dragon Boat Festival contains these stories, for example), are probably inventions that help to bind together the figure of Qu Yuan with an older folk tradition.

Wen Yiduo, Poetry and Poetics Expert, 1920s and 1930s

Wen Yiduo, Painting by his son, Wen Lipeng (?)

David Hawkes quotes Wen Yiduo to show the general tendency to praise Qu Yuan in the 20th century:

Although Qu Yuan did not write about the life of the people or voice their sufferings, he may truthfully be said to have acted as the leader of a people's revolution and to have struck a blow to avenge them. Qu Yuan is the only person in the whole of Chinese history who is fully entitled to be called 'the People's Poet'.

Qu Yuan, the Poet turned Patriot

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Turning Towards the Ming for a bit

The 'Massive Martial' Emperor, from a set of playing cards I myself remember seeing at gift shops in China in 2009

Fairbank, John King. China : A New History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.

I was surprised to find that Fairbank's great textbook, China: A New History (here are my inspectional reading notes), devotes fewer than 15 pages to the entire Ming dynasty. Like most accounts, this one includes reference to the powerful personality of the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, aka the Hongwu ('Massive Martial') Emperor. Fairbank informs also that he was 'ugly to look at.' (p. 128)

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A Modern Poetics of Biography

Leon Edel gives Yang Zhengrun the idea for the English title of the book

Yang Zhengrun 杨正润. Xiandai zhuanji xue 现代传记学 (A Modern Poetics of Biography). Nanjing, China: Nanjing University Press, May 2009.

Since I last posted on this book, I've gone through the introduction and gotten a bit fuller idea of what the author is trying to do. At the very least, one of the striking features of the work is that it will enable me to prepare a bibliography of sources in English on the subject of biographical criticism. Whether it can help me more than that by giving me an accurate account of all such sources is something I'll have to try and determine along the way. What I'm picturing now is that I'll slowly read this entire book while casting my eyes over many of the books it mentions, building a dissertation bibliography as I go.

Books Mentioned in the Introduction:

Maurois, André. Aspects of Biography. New York, Ungar, 1966 [1957].

Clifford, James. Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism, 1560-1960. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Schiff, Hilda. Contemporary approaches to English studies. London ;New York: Heinemann Educational for the English Association ;;Barnes & Noble Books, 1977.

Edel, Leon. Writing Lives : Principia Biographica. New York: Norton, 1984.

Nadel, Ira. Biography : fiction, fact, and form. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984.

Epstein, William. Recognizing biography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

Epstein, William. Contesting the subject : essays in the postmodern theory and practice of biography and biographical criticism. West Lafayette Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1991.

Folkenflik, Robert. The Culture of autobiography : constructions of self-representation. Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Ellis, David. Imitating art : essays in biography. London ;;Boulder Colo.: Pluto Press, 1994.

Hogan, Joseph. "Life Writing Canon and Traditions," Auto/Biography Studies, Vol. Fal 1994, p. 163.

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Qian Qianyi on Du Fu

Qian Qianyi, pic from here

My classmate, Hao Ji, brought a text called Chu xue ji 初學集 (The 'Begin to Study' Collection) by the Ming-Qing scholar Qian Qianyi 銭謙益 (1582-1664).


We read a few prefaces that describe Qian Qianyi's conception of previous scholarship on Du Fu and modestly introduces his own contributions to the field. The modesty that characterizes the tone and the rhetoric of the pieces is of great note here (more to come when I'm not so tired). Notes to the reading.

Also see:

Yan, Zhixiong. The Poet-historian Qian Qianyi. New York: Routledge, 2009.

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Syllabus for a Writing Class

In which I officially begin to work on the syllabus for Spring 2009's ALL 4900w: Senior Thesis Project

Goals of the course:

To produce a 20-25 page research paper with bibliography with 30 people. No one will be left out. Everyone will produce a decent paper.

Texts: How to Read a Book by Mortimer Jerome Adler

Things to Include:

(Multiple) Individual Meetings with Students
Scaled writing assignments, very very often, on the moodle site
Guide to Using the Library

Rough Stages of the Process:

Topic
Bibliography
Examination of the Bibliography
Major Terms
Major Issues
Main Ideas of the Paper
Draft 1
Final Draft

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Qu Yuan : State of My Knowledge, Briefly

Taiwan's Cloud Gate Dancers do a bit of evocative shaman dancing:




Major Sources on Qu Yuan:

Qu, Yuan. The Songs of the South : An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. The huge introduction here is my end-all source for information.

Waters, Geoffrey. Three Elegies of Chʻu : An Introduction to the Traditional Interpretation of the Chʻu tzʻu. Madison Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Not really a major source, perhaps so much as an interesting exercise in philology which I would like to investigate (together with Kael, perhaps).

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Top Works on Biography

Dr. Johnson, authoritatively

Well, Lecture 1 is nearly done, and only took about 3 times as long as it should have. There are still needling little tasks to be added on, like the addition of slides with passages from the Xiang Yu biography, accompanied with tips on reading biography. Also I need to write out a sentence or two of each bit of the slide-show preview. Still, I feel strongly the impulse to move on and get started on the next lectures.

One week from today I have to deliver a lecture that is yet to be written! Stress!

Meanwhile, my background research is looking more and more fun. Oh, how I wish I could simply read books, and not have to respond to them either in writing or by teaching.

The Study of Biography, A Brief Bibliography

Samuel Johnson. Rambler #60. October 13, 1750.


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Not as Smart as Dr. Watson

Donald Keene and Burton Watson

Burton Watson was Columbia class of 1950; I'm Harvard class of 2002. In 1957, Burton Watson published Ssu-ma Ch'ien: Grand Historian of China. It's 2009, 7 years since I've graduated from Harvard, but I've produced essentially nothing. What I can't get over is that Watson didn't just put out a book -- he put out a terrific book, at once a joy to read and a meaty bit of historiography.

What a wake-up call. I think I've been wasting a lot of time.

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Lecture 1: A Preview of the Course

Experiment: Can I post presentations from GoogleDocs to Blogger? You'd think that would be possible...




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