Organizer: Julia Murray, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Cynthia J. Brokaw, University of Oregon
Lured into Tao Qian’s Villages: Representations of Farm Life in the Works of Tao Qian
Pauline Lin, Harvard University
The Six Dynasties witnessed a rise of villages (cun) in rural space, which became primary agricultural centers in the south. Tao Qian’s corpus is the most extensive literary representation of village and farm life from this period. By reading Tao Qian’s poetry against concurrent historical and geographical sources, I will show how farming culture in contemporary Jiangzhou influenced Tao Qian’s village life, and how Tao’s poetry can enrich our understanding of daily life in southern villages. The paper will concentrate on representations of Tao’s three residences: the one in Upper Metropolis (Shangjing), the Abode of the Field and Gardens (Tianyuanju), and his hut in Southern Village (Nancun), all in Jiangzhou (present-day Jiangxi).
I will argue that Tao Qian elevates farm life as an object of poetic and aesthetic contemplation (while his contemporaries seek out unusual, out-of-the-way landscapes). Moreover, through the apparently simple diction and through depicting the pleasures and misfortunes of everyday life, Tao embues his poetry with a distinct personal voice which vividly portrays a life—his life. Farm life is thus associated with Tao consciously choosing to become who he is.
Ironically, later paintings of Tao Qian rarely show the poet in agrarian settings (see Li Xiang, Zhu Derun, Chen Hongshou and others; a notable exception is Li Gonglin’s "Picture of Tao Yuanming Returning to Seclusion" where Tao is depicted in various village settings). How do these painters interpret Tao Qian?
Yanzi Jian: A Comparative Study of Its Drama Version and Its Novel Version
Jianyu Zhou, National University of Singapore
After its publication and ensuing popularity, Yanzi Jian, one of the Late Ming Period’s remarkable pieces of the Caizi-jiaren (Scholar-beauty) drama, was revised and published as a novel. As a result, it became one of the Caizi-jiaren novels of the Qing Period. Using the same title and same theme, what differences occurred with the revision from a drama to a novel? Within the tradition of Caizi-jiaren theme, is it representative of the main characteristic transformation of the Ming drama to the Qing novel?
While recognizing the similarities between the two regarding its plot of mis-recognition and use of irony, continuity was maintained in the transformation from the Ming drama version to the Qing novel version. One obvious difference is the change of discourse from the performance of the drama version to the narrative novel version. A large portion of the songs sung by the character in the drama disappeared while the colloquial plot of the novel increased. By coincidence, the lyrical feature, one of the most important characteristics, in the former, vanished while the narrative became more important in the latter. The double statues of character and narrator played by the sole character in the drama were separated as the story narrator, in the novel, appeared and portrayed a more determinative role.
These points will be cleared up by my providing evidence from the two versions revealing the obvious relationship of the general features regarding the shift from traditional Chinese drama to the Chinese novel. The novel version of Yanzi Jian did not simply imitate its previous drama version, but did make many distinctive changes based on the narrative conventions of the traditional Chinese novel.
Conscience (liangxin) and Love (qing): A New Interpretation of Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting)
Yu-Yin Cheng, Marymount Manhattan College
The late Ming period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experienced accelerated transformation in thought and society in every respect. The period saw the blooming of popular literature on the theme of qing (love), departing from previous literary works which drew sources from traditional values, such as ritual propriety (li). This paper explores the intricate relationship between the emerging literary themes and philosophical concepts of late Ming. It looks into the question whether concepts of moral philosophy were transmuted into values of emotional life as developed in fiction and plays. The case studied here is Tang Xianzu’s (1550–1616) Peony Pavilion (Mudang ting), the masterpiece of Ming drama on the theme of qing, which was based on an earlier prompt book story, Du Liniang muse huanhun (Enamored of Love, Du Liniang Returns to Life), by an anonymous writer in 1541. Comparing Tang’s play with the 1541 prompt-book version, I shall highlight Tang’s complex views of qing as exemplified in this play, and then discuss Tang’s views in reference to the philosophical ideas of Taizhou school, which is widely regarded as the broadest and the most liberal school of Confucianism in late imperial times. I argue that the meanings of conscience (liangxin) as taught by the Taizhou school find its counterpart in qing, as expressed in The Peony Pavilion. This similarity suggests that certain philosophical ideas in late Ming have been integrated into the values instilled in the literary works of that period.
Lyric Complex in the Early Qing Scholar-Beauty Romance
Chi Xiao, National University of Singapore
This paper explores the generic significance of the early-Qing scholar-beauty romance in terms of its intertextual dialogue with The Story of the Stone. It contends that the former embodies "lyric complex" on two levels: not only does the poet-protagonist’s victory in these fictions dramatize the novelist’s nostalgia for a world which is advocated through verse-making, but the story-telling process also demonstrates a poetic way of thinking: by using parallelism as a basic device of plot construction, the unpredictable world of contingency was reduced to an overarching whole. This twofold anachronism is evidence of a convoluted nostalgia toward the lyric tradition, precisely at the waning of its effulgence, due to the rise of the novel!
Seen from this perspective, caizi jiaren fiction lends us a special lens to examine the evolution of the novel in China down to The Story of the Stone. As such, it goes far beyond scholars’ previous suggestions, namely, that it thematically bridges Plum in the Golden Vase with The Story of the Stone; provides The Stone with a frame of intertextualities in the form of scenes, motifs, and the way the author invents characters’ names; or offers a "chaste mode" of romance alongside the "erotical mode," so that The Stone fulfils a thematic synthesis, "[going] in both directions and neither at the same time, ending with the impossibility of both happy monogamy and happy polygamy." The importance of this school of fiction lies in its being an indicator of an encounter between the lyrical poetry and the novel. How to respond, thematically and generically, to the aforementioned lyric complex therefore becomes a fundamentally significant part of The Story of the Stone.