Organizer: Carol R. Kaufmann, University of Michigan
Chair: Wai-yee Li, University of Pennsylvania
Discussants: Wai-yee Li, University of Pennsylvania; Madeline Men-li Chu,
Kalamazoo College
This panel will explore the early Qing literary obsession with memory and history, the personal and collective pasts, by examining the works of major poets Wu Weiye (1609-1672), Cao Zhenji (1634-1698) and Zhu Yizun (1629-1709). This obsession is part of ongoing cultural developments from the late Ming sharpened by the physical and psychological displacement of the Ming-Qing transition. In the work of these poets, it took many forms but is characterized by inquiry and dialogue. The dialogue is (1) cross-generational, as poets found past models, correspondences and contexts meaningful to the present; (2) contemporary, as they expressed their feelings towards change and loss and developed literary forms through large cycles of poetic exchanges (changhe); and even (3) forward-looking, as their increased sense of historical change heightened their desire to transmit and be known by future scholars. The sheer volume of literary historical material which survives helps us understand these poems in subtle context. The early Qing new critical engagement with the past was a driving force for poetic innovation, resulting in poetry of great variety in style and voice as well as a complex historical sensibility.
Layered History in Wu Weiye's (1609-1672) Four Yangzhou Poems
Yuanfang Tong, Harvard University
This paper centers around a series of four poems written by Wu Weiye, when he passed through Yangzhou on his way to Beijing to take office in 1653, eight years after Yangzhou's fall and the collapse of the Southern Ming. This series, which involves no movement through the landscape of the poet, but expresses the dynamic shift of the situation in his mind, draws from both yongshi and huaigu traditions. Wu plays deliberately against a poetic mode that was first given prominence by Bao Zhao (c. 414-466) and later developed by Du Mu (803-852). The poetic images of Yangzhou's remote past are intermingled with Wu's memories of historical events which occurred here in the recent past, culminating in the Qing sack of the city. These selected historical facts put emperor Hongguang right in the line of irresponsible last emperors of the Southern Dynasties, and may suggest official misdeeds of the Southern Ming Court. Wu's process of merging layers of the remote and recent past produces complicated emotions of human loss. At the same time, poetic tension is created by two juxtapositions: an absence of the self in the couplets containing historical allusions contrasted with his lamentation over the loss of Yangzhou; and the meditations themselves, written while journeying to serve the new Qing dynasty.
Between Recollection and Anticipation: An Analysis of Wu Weiye's (1609-1672) Play
Tongtian tai
Dietrich Tschanz, Princeton University
In this paper I explore why and how literati of the early Qing used the zaju genre to convey the predicaments and sensitivities specific to their time. I will do this through an analysis of Wu Weiye's zaju Tongtian tai (Terrace of Communication with Heaven). This play is included in Zou Shijin's (js. 1640) comprehensive collection of early Qing zaju, Zaju san ji (1662), in which it stands out as a paradigmatic example of the early Qing zaju genre. Wu's play comprises the most successful attempt of an early Qing literatus to articulate, in the form of the zaju play, the sense of predicament and intense feeling of loss that he, as so many fellow literati of his generation, felt after the fall of the Ming. I will argue that in the genre's characteristic tension between the conflicting tendencies of the lyric (to recall) and the dramatic (to anticipate), Wu found an adequate literary form to convey his feeling of entrapment and his anguish. Wu was drawn to the scholar-official Shen Jiong (c. 502-c. 560), whom he made the play's main protagonist, because he saw in Shen's suffering a striking correspondence to his own. By centering the play around Shen's visit to the ruins of the Terrace of Communication with Heaven, Wu Weiye is able not only to capture Shen's meditations on this particular site, but also to simultaneously give voice, through them, to his own more general reflections on the scope of human agency in the historical process.
Cao Zhenji's (1634-1698) Lyrics Considering Men of the Past
Carol R. Kaufmann, University of Michigan
The period 1650-1679 represents the apogee of popularity and later influence of the early Qing ci revival. Retrospective criticism which divides Qing ci into schools, separating writing in wanyue (indirect and refined) and haofang (unrestrained and masculine) modes, does not capture the highly experimental and cooperative literary scene, in which poets eagerly exchanged poems, echoed each other, and sought old manuscripts as models.
History, experienced personally and through texts, is a predominant common subject matter amidst this poetic diversity. The slim surviving ci collection of lyricist Cao Zhenji (1634-1698) includes historical poetry achieving a voice which later critics considered unique and sincere while being deeply embedded in its literary and social milieu. Cao echoed many of the huaigu poems of fellow-poet Zhu Yizun (1629-1709) and became famous for his huaigu and yongshi ci.
In this paper, I will examine some of Cao's verse in two different contexts: his huaigu verse echoing poems by Zhu and others on the Late Tang general Li Keyong, a non-Han Shato Turk, and poems forming part of a cycle of echoing verse which the storyteller Liu Jingting (ca. 1590-after 1669) requested from prominent scholars when he arrived in the capital in the early 1670s. This verse not only expresses Cao's morally complex assessment of history but also embodies processes affecting poetic creation in 1670s Beijing: literary appropriation and patronage.