Organizer: David W. Pankenier, Lehigh University<
Chair: Robert Hymes,
Columbia University
Prologue and Prolepsis: The Opening Strategy in Traditional Chinese Novels
Hua Laura Wu, Huron College
Writers of traditional Chinese vernacular fiction often began their stories with a prologue tale. This opening strategy is sometimes seen as a reminder of the genre's humble beginning: the storyteller using the tale as a stalling technique to attract and appease the audience.
My paper intends to investigate the prologue tale from a different perspective: the tale as a textual strategy to resolve the problem of where and how to begin a story. This paper will study about twenty traditional novels with a common feature: they all start with a supernatural tale of exile from Heaven. The paper will analyze these tales first to establish a typology: either the tale is about the virtuous protagonists' voluntary exile from Heaven; or it is about a forced exile for the less than perfect protagonists to undertake a purgatory in the mundane world. Another aim of the study is to examine the tale's function in the overall narrative structure: how the opening tales are related to the main narrative; how motifs, character traits, and metafictional hints in the opening are further developed later in the novel; and how these tales are teleologically informing and influencing the denouement of the storyline.
A hypothesis to be verified in the study is that the strongly marked prologue might be culturally specific. The penchant for such opening strategy might be motivated by the Chinese fascination with the beginning of the universe, and thus can be seen as reflecting the metaphysical thinking in the Chinese cultural milieu.
Milk and Scent: Women Shih-shuo
Nanxiu Qian, Rice University
Two Women Shih-shuo (Nü Shih-shuo) can be found among dozens of imitations of the Shih-shuo hsin-yü (A New Account of Tales of the World), one by a male writer, Li Ch'ing (1602-1683), composed around early 1650s, the other by a woman, Yen Heng (1826?-1854), published a decade or so after her death. Li's work includes seven hundred and fifty-nine remarkable stories about women from the antiquity to the end of Yuan, which he categorizes into thirty-one types. Yen Heng managed in her short lifetime to put together only seventy nine unclassified entries about Ch'ing women-literati. Despite differences in motivation, agenda, and purpose between the two works, they are consistent in forming a women's value system that reflects the cultural context of their time.
Occupying the center of this value system are two pivotal elements associated with the female body-ju, or milk, and hsiang, or scent. Their fluid and penetrating essence connects the body of women to the rest of the world and hence defines the value relationships in between. Although the milk value and the scent value often intersect each other, the episodes in both Li's and Yen's Nü Shih-shuo reveal that milk is more closely related to moral issues and scent usually to aesthetic concerns.
The two Nü Shih-shuo also mark the difficulty of harmonizing milk value and scent value under misogynistic circumstances. For many intellectual women, it was simply too frustrating to bring their scent value-often embodied in their literary and artistic achievements-through the passage of marriage and then to merge it into their motherhood. The only way out was to stick to their virgin status in order to maintain their scent value at the expense of their milk value. Yet even this "pure" aesthetic choice seemed to be a mere fantasy, a literati ideal which existed only in an illusory world.
Plum Craze in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature
Zuyan Zhou, University of Florida
A prominent feature of late Ming/early Qing literature is a craze for plum blossom, which emerges as a frequent trope for characters' political/gender stance and a literary device to project ideal personality. A literati recluse entitles himself "plum crazy," a dramatist names his work "A Tale of Red Plum Blossom," while heroes and heroines in fictions and dramas strive to identify with the snow-defying flower in their confrontation of power source and hegemonic ideology. Consequently the poetic skill of composing plum chanting verse becomes a tour de force and a touch stone of cai and jiaren in the scholar-beauty romances, whereas Mei (plum) emerges as a popular surname in the genre. The paper examines the adoption of plum rhetoric, originally a lyrical device for self-expression in Chinese poetic convention, in the popular genres of fiction and drama when political decadence and ideological suppression urged dissident souls to seek new ways of defining self-identity through literary creation. It relates literati's hidden urge to affirm personal authenticity as marginalized/feminized subjects as a dominant psychological drive behind such a plum craze, and traces its gradual phasing out after mid-Qing.
The Way of Health Preservation with Diet in Yuan Dynasty
Wei Ming Chen, Jinan University, Guangzhou
Health preservation with diet (HPWD) is to further regulate one's body function through reasonably applied diet and to implement the rediscovery of diseases to build up one's body and lengthen one's life after meeting the basic eating and drinking needs in one's life. The Chinese ancient health preservation with diet has a long history. It was said that eating methods which can cure diseases were quoted in "Tang Yie Jing," written by Prime Minister Yi Yun in the Shang dynasty. However, they have been lost. There was also a position of dietitian for curing diseases with food in the Zhou dynasty. It was not until Tang and Sung times, with the development of the economy and the progress of science, that the knowledge and practice of health preservation with diet developed; famous doctors appeared continuously, and works on HPWD occurred frequently. Therefore, it turned into a professional subject. Although the Yuan dynasty was ruled by the Mongols, the development of Chinese food culture did not stop, nor did HPWD. On the basis of the development in Tang and Sung, the theory and methods were continuously improved and enriched. Especially, the China-overseas culture communications and emerging development of Han and Mongol helped to enrich the theories and methods of Chinese ancient HPWD. This set up an important basis for the prosperity of HPWD in Ming and Qing times, and even in recent times, which has great significance, both for science and for culture.