Thinking Through the “Literary Chinese Cosmopolis:”

Thinking Through the “Literary Chinese Cosmopolis:” 
Poetic Glimpses from Ninth Century Silla Korea and Heian Japan

Dr. Xin Wei, Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, Boston University
Chair/Discussant: Professor Wiebke Denecke, Professor of East Asian Literatures and Comparative Literature, Boston University

Thursday, March 29, 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm

Co-sponsored by the World Languages and Literatures Department and the Boston University Center for the Humanities

The event will take place at:

CAS 426, Boston University, 725 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

Abstract

Xin Wei
Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow
Boston University

Sheldon Pollock’s vision of a “Sanskrit Cosmopolis” has recently inspired East Asianists to think about the nature of premodern East Asia and the interregional cultural exchange. In this paper I show how to use Pollock’s concept to discover a “Literary Chinese Cosmopolis” with its own distinctive traits. I examine the function of “literary Chinese” as a cosmopolitan poetic language in East Asia, zooming into the ninth century and the appearance of two superlative writers in literary Chinese, Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn from Silla Korea and Sugawara no Michizane from Heian Japan: Ch’oe is celebrated as the founding father of “literature in Chinese” in Korean history, and Michizane is worshiped in the many Tenmangū across Japan as the God of scholarship, one of the top three Shinto cults in modern-day Japan. Together with their Tang contemporary, Pi Rixiu, who joined Huang Chao’s rebellion to overthrow the Tang, I sample each of their poems to show their unique, but time-sensitive, participations in the “Literary Chinese Cosmopolis.” I argue that the conquering and mastering of the Chinese civilization by the “barbarians” is also the underlying reason for the collapse of the Literary Chinese cosmopolis.