China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Christian de Pee, Barnard College
Chair: Amy McNair, University of Kansas
Discussant: Maggie Bickford, Brown University
As definitions of elite status changed in the tenth century, a struggle over cultural hegemony ensued. Literati fought this battle in their studios, in academies, in examination halls, in print, at court, and in other public places associated with cultural production. In prose, poetry, painting, calligraphy, attire, and gardens, literati sought to distinguish themselves from other literati as well as from the imperial court and from non-literati. Through close readings of categories, themes, and styles in Song prose and paintings, this panel explores literati strategies of distinction. Although the papers set out from interests defined by the fields of social history, intellectual history, and art history, all move toward a cross-disciplinary cultural history that has the ability to accommodate the broad scope of Song literati culture.
Martin Powers examines the response of the Song imperial court to literati constructions of labor, taxes, and political authority in poems and paintings of rural production. Hilde de Weerdt compares competing styles of composition in Southern Song examination manuals to gain insight into the development of Daoxue ideology and its relation to examination culture. Christian de Pee argues that organizational categories and stylistic particularities in manuals for wedding correspondence barred non-literati from full participation in their economy of cultural capital. Peter Bol explores the tension between inclusive and exclusive strategies in the Neo-Confucian movement, resulting from the need to speak in a distinctive voice that was at the same time legitimate.
Martin Powers, University of Michigan
The institutional separation of court and state in Song China made possible what Peter Bol has called an "intellectual world that defined itself against political authority." Often failing to influence political action through the exercise of office, Song intellectuals found they could still influence political and moral standards in the arena of culture.
Literati painting thus is not just a peculiar expression of Chinese culture. Literati culture could not have arisen until political authority was disengaged from hereditary, charismatic authority through the civil service examination system and the concomitant separation of court and state. Only then could questions of taste and morality emerge as personal practice open to discussion (institutionalized in the colophon), a field distinct from aristocratic culture. Seen in this context, the literati rejection of courtly taste in literature, calligraphy, and painting represented far more than the display of snobbish sentiment.
Such a development required the invention of new strategies of distinction by non-aristocratic yet literate men of political ambition. Literati painting, with its rejection of naturalism and finish, or its preference for metonymic over metaphoric modes of representation, can be understood as one stratagem of social distinction in Bourdieu’s sense. But distinction gave rise to counter-distinction, generating a dialectic, and the court found itself compelled either to adapt or to oppose literati strategies of authorization. This paper will examine the court’s response to literati constructions of labor, taxes, and political authority in both poems and paintings of rural production.
Hilde de Weerdt, Harvard University
This paper discusses shifts in examination preparation through an analysis of the systemic differences and interaction between competing styles in Southern Song examination manuals.
The pedagogy of Zhu Xi, the central figure in the institutionalization of Daoxue ideology, was informed by shiwen (current, fashionable writing). Rather than a particular genre or style, shiwen constituted a field in which different styles competed. Zhu Xi was especially critical of the influence of what he called the "Yongjia style" in shiwen. Chen Fuliang and Lü Zuqian, masters of Yongjia learning, had gained a wide hearing among examination candidates preparing in district schools and academies and at the Imperial College for their writing and compositional techniques as well as for their historical scholarship and interest in institutions and government.
As Daoxue received social and political recognition, it became part of shiwen culture. In thirteenth-century Southern Song leishu (encyclopedias), Daoxue ideology was introduced and given prominence through the insertion and strategic placement of new thematic categories. The Daoxue sense of moral urgency effected a new concern with the immediate present in policy essay writing. At the same time, archival and rhetorical categories developed from earlier manuals were used to convey Daoxue priorities alongside opposing voices.
In this paper I will address the historical and political aspects of Yongjia learning in two Yongjia manuals for policy essays. I will also discuss the implications of my findings for the development of Daoxue ideology and its relation to examination culture.
Christian de Pee, Barnard College
During the eleventh century, literati produced series of intricate literary exchanges to accompany the different stages of their wedding ceremonies. This wedding correspondence served as a vehicle for the display of cultural capital, balancing the conspicuous display of financial wealth in weddings. Its parallel prose demanded of the author an erudition that could only have been acquired by years of intensive study. The format of the exchanges, mimicking government documents, linked the writing party to prestigious official service.
As the use of wedding correspondence spread down the social scale in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, a socio-cultural hierarchy arose in which symbolic value declined as the quality of writing faded from original creation to mere copy and literary production moved from the circle of family and acquaintances to financially remunerated scribes.
Writing manuals (leishu) like the thirteenth-century New Book for the Old Man Under the Moon (Yuelao xinshu) enforced this hierarchy. Although appearing to suspend the boundaries of literary production, the external and internal marking of the materials in this writing aid distinguishes literati from non-literati. The arrangement of appropriate expressions and model letters expounds the conceit of four discrete classes (simin), headed by the literati. The style of the literati letters differs markedly from that of the other models. Where literati correspondence creates a free-floating, self-referential textual universe in which the mode of representation is the object of representation, commoner letters refer to things rather than images, reducing metaphors to metonyms and wit to humor.
Peter K. Bol, Harvard University
This paper argues that at all levels the Neo-Confucian movement faced a contradiction between exclusive and inclusive strategies.
To establish their particular identity among literati intellectuals and their claim to political and social authority, Neo-Confucian leaders set themselves apart from the literati status quo in education and culture, and frequently led the opposition to the court. This paper explores some of the ways Neo-Confucians developed to represent their distinctiveness.
At the same time, in order to gain a hearing among the literati, to solicit patronage from well-to-do families, and to gain the support of local officials and court leaders, Neo-Confucians frequently presented themselves as better equipped to realize traditional elite interests such as passing examinations, rising within the bureaucracy, contracting good marriages, and maintaining kin-group solidarity.
This paper examines both inclusive and exclusionary strategies and shows that in several instances successful attempts to gain state patronage were accompanied by public acts of opposition to and withdrawal from participation in the political system of the day.