A New “New Philology”: Rethinking Variance in Classical Chinese Literature, with Zhuming Yao (Swarthmore College) (Friday, Feb. 2, 2024)

Boston University’s Department of World Languages & Literatures is pleased to invite you to the lecture

A New “New Philology”: Rethinking Variance in Classical Chinese Literature

Zhuming Yao

Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese, Swarthmore College

Friday, February 2, from 5:30-7:00 pm

in STH 625 (School of Theology, 745 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215)

Abstract:

Variance is a common feature of many manuscript cultures. The idea that a text used to exist in a multiplicity of forms is familiar to readers of, for example, Homer, the New Testament, and various medieval European literatures. For much of the Chinese tradition before the age of print, a text that does not witness some variation in wording, structure, or even narrative shape is also unusual. Faced with such lack of textual fixity, scholars have adopted a range of approaches toward the problem, many of which based on opposing premises. What few would dispute, much less question, is the cause of variance: the historical conditions so characteristic of a manuscript culture that make it a breeding ground for textual variation. In this talk, I aim to take this scholarship one step further. Instead of what has been treated as essentially a literary-historical fact of the Chinese manuscript culture, I demonstrate how variance constitutes a literary aesthetic in classical Chinese writings. There existed, in other words, a shared taste for variance and a set of strategies and conventions used by generations of authors, editors, and compilers alike for the creative production and, importantly, preservation of variance. This understanding turns textual variation from a problem driven by philological interests to one arising from literary creation in the first place. It also invites us to reevaluate the relationship between literature and philology, as well as the role classical Chinese literature can play in broader studies of comparative literature and global antiquity.

About the Speaker:

Zhuming Yao works on classical Chinese literature, literary criticism, and comparative literary studies. After receiving his Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University in 2023, Zhuming joined Swarthmore College as Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature. Zhuming’s dissertation examines speech representation across early Chinese writings and offers an account of the underlying poetics of this prominent rhetorical exercise, in and by writing. The project highlights writing’s role in appropriating the discursive advantages of the oral form, a phenomenon often misconstrued as writing’s reproduction, faithful or not, of the spoken word. As Zhuming is now revising his dissertation for publication, he has begun work on a new project centered on the intersections between philological and literary criticism. The first result from that project, an article deconstructing the concept of authenticity made canonical by late imperial philologists concerning pre-imperial literature, is under review at T’oung Pao. Outside of research, Zhuming translates English scholarship for readers in China.