Back to Events of Monday 25th February 2019
Monday | 06:00 PM | Xi shuai (Cricket) and Its Consequences Issues in Early Chinese Poetry and Textual Studies Prof. Dr. Martin Kern, Princeton University, Department of East Asian Studies  Martin Kern The lecture explores questions about the composition, performance, circulation, and transmission of early Chinese poetry. Instead of taking individual poems as discrete, reified objects in the form we encounter them in the Mao Shi, it is suggested to read them as particular instantiations of circumscribed repertoires where the individual poetic text is but one of many realizations of a shared body of ideas and expressions. This analysis is informed by the examination of both manuscript texts and the received literature, but also by comparative perspectives gained from both medieval Chinese literature and other ancient and medieval literary traditions. In emphasizing the formation of poetry as a continuous process, it leaves behind notions of “the original text,” authorship, and the moment of “original composition”—notions that held no prominence in the early Chinese literary tradition before the empire. Address Institut für Sinologie Raum 201 Akademiestraße 4-8 69117 Heidelberg Organizer Institut für Sinologie Homepage Organizer www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/sinologie Contact |