Learning about Language Learning

What is best way to teach Chinese?

Contained here are a few texts glimpsed while I edit a Chinese student's masters thesis in language education:


One reference is to:

Harrison, I. (1996). Look who's talking now: Listening to voices in curriculum renewal. In K.M. Bailey & D. Nunan (Eds.), Voices from the language classrooms (pp. 283-303). New York: Cambridge University Press

points to other essays of interest from that volume:









Some volumes of what has been "an emerging field" since 1996:





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SWCAS 2009

Here's the presentation I'm planning to display tomorrow at my talk for the Southwest Conference on Asian Studies:



Sadly, I was not efficient enough to put together a clean, finished conference paper. Just as A. often says of himself, I was too lazy.


But as always when preparing to present at a conference, I feel a new burst of energy and productivity. I think what I learned this time around is that I need to pay attention to the action level of my mind, just as pay attention to my heart rate when I jog. And I need to keep the action of the mind high -- this will have me reading more and writing more, I hope.

One other thing: my presentation will actually be quite good I think. This partial paper, while not satisfactory in some senses, is actually a great start. The method that I see for writing is to select passages, come up with main idea sentences, and develop section headings practically all of the time. I'm still building towards the iterative process necessary to produce highly 'finished' work. More later on this.

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Fantasy Bibliography

Stuff I can probably write, if I work hard:

"Life Writing in China: State of the Field"


The Penguin Book of Chinese Life Writing (I need to work on the cover of this one)

"The Life Writing in the Guwen guanzhi" (okay, that's more like a footnote than a paper. But hey.)

The History of Chinese



About the Author (this is fake, duh): Jesse Field is the John King Fairbank Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Harvard University. His screenplay God Wars of the Chinese Mind was made into a film by a sexy young Chinese director and won the 2015 Oscar for Best Picture. He's also Master of Lowell House.
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The Great Book Migration

身邊的書籍

I'm going to slowly go through all of the Chinese books I've purchased (not as many as you'd think!) and prepare to get rid of them -- probably in one big sale to Book House, a great store right near my office.



As a first step, I'll move the books a few at a time from my house to my office. Today is the first installment:

Xu Zhen 許慎 (d. 120 CE) and Xiang Shu 向夏, editor. Shuo wen jie zi bu shou jiang shu : Zhongguo wen zi xue dao lun 說文解字部首講疏 : 中國文字學導論 [The Shuowen jiezi, with commentary and annotations arranged by radicals: a guide to Chinese philology]. Taipei: Shulin chuban youxian gongsi, 1999.

Gao Zhengyi 高政一 and Wu Shaozhi 吳紹志, editors and translators. Xin yi gu wen guan zhi 新譯 古文觀止 [The Guwen guanzhi, a new translation]. Tainan: Xin shiji chubanshe, 1985. An old high-school edition with no ISBN and a no entry in the Worldcat. Kind of a nice relic of Taiwan's early post-martial-law period. I paid a dollar for this in a Taipei used bookstore, but it may not even have that much value these days.

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Montaigne in the New Yorker

Montaigne a la New Yorker (Thanks stevereads)

KRAMER, JANE. “ME, MYSELF, AND I..” New Yorker 85, no. 27 (2009): 34-41.

"Suspend Judgment"

A tourist visits Montaigne's tower in Bordeaux

Friend in a high place

New Edition

Étienne de La Boétie

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Self and Reference

"The Self" and The Reference Problem

From some mostly incomprehensible notes I took while reading The Encyclopedia of Life Writing.


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Sinicization

Review of Wittfogel and Feng 1949 in Scientific American, of all places

After reading chapter 5 of Fairbank's China: A New History, I follow up with some searching into the last great work (or is there a newer one?) summing up the first major incursion of 'alien' peoples onto Chinese lands: the Khitans (or Qidan, or also Chitan, apparently). Somehow, I feel like questioning the objectivity of this most esteemingly objective periodical.

Still, how awesome would it be if Chinese history were still considered a topic for Scientific American?
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Forward to the Song Dynasty

Map of the Song, marked with the territory lost in 1279

It's time to end Unit 1 of my class. Historiography-wise, we are done learning about the various points on the traditional dynastic sequence of Warring-States, Han dynasty, and Period of Disunion: that is, we see the textbook example of the rise and fall of a unified Chinese dynasty.

I'm not including any readings from the Tang dynasty, so I will skip right over it with brief mention (sorry, class -- maybe on another iteration we'll do Li Bai). Tomorrow the students are expecting to talk about the autobiography of Li Qingzhao and a one or two of her poems, so I'll need to give them a brief historical background.

A map shows us that the important thing to know about the Song is that half of the kingdom was lost to the Northern Jin in 1179. I mention my favorite image of the Khitan, their funny pots:



Quickly, though, we have to move on to Li Qingzhao. We'll talk about her autobiography, certainly -- that's the central feature of this lecture. We'll also explore a bit of her lyric poetry as well, though:

One poem covered by Theresa Teng.



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Daji the Evil Bitch

Daji, 1964 Shaw Bros. film

I talked about the figure of the evil concubine Daji today as I introduced Ban the Concubine to class, and I wasn't at all surprised to find that they loved her immediately. But unfortunately there is no good solid translation of her life into English; looks like a job for Life Writing Man!


Among several sort of substandard retellings of the story, one that made me smile is a new volume called Liberal Utopianism Is Destroying the United States (2009) by Charles Keitz. I'm not sure what role Daji plays for Mr. Keitz -- maybe she's Hilary Clinton?










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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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