A Paradox of Seeing and Knowing: Rethinking the “Storyteller’s Manner” Narrative Mode in Chinese Vernacular Fiction, with Canaan Morse (Weds. January 31, 2024)

Boston University’s Department of World Languages and Literatures is pleased to present

A Paradox of Seeing and Knowing: Rethinking the “Storyteller’s Manner” Narrative Mode in Chinese Vernacular Fiction

Canaan Morse

Visiting Assistant Professor of Premodern Chinese Literature, Boston University

Wednesday, January 31, 2024 from 5:30-7:00 pm

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

Abstract:

 This talk re-evaluates the “storyteller’s manner” – a dominant narrative mode in premodern Chinese vernacular literature which simulates the persona of an oral storyteller – by dating one of its central stylistic features earlier than previously thought, and by demonstrating how that feature contributes to a unique receptive context likely inspired by oral performance. It unpacks a narrative paradox in the 13th-century poem-tale Tripitaka of the Tang Empire Fetches the Scriptures (ancestor of the later novel Journey to the West), in which verbs of sensing create a “simulacrum of seeing” that presents individual scenes as live events, even while the tale repeatedly depicts its own story arc as a foregone conclusion known to both speaker and reader. In fact, the superficial conflict between the “seen” scene and “known” tale reflects a narrative dynamic common to oral storytelling, in which a participatory immersion in the bounded episode enables re-connection to the larger tradition. This symbiosis between style and theme imbues the “storyteller’s manner” with far more thematic significance than it is usually afforded, and changes our understanding of narrative causality and reader expectations in many of the Ming-dynasty stories in which it appears.

About the Speaker:

Canaan Morse is Visiting Assistant Professor of Premodern Chinese Literature at Boston University. His current book project, Reading as Reliving: Tradition and Transmediality in Vernacular Chinese Fiction, explores the intersection of performance and print in popular literatures of China’s Ming dynasty, enriching the study of ancient texts with fieldwork on living Chinese oral performance traditions. In addition, his translations of contemporary Chinese literature have won the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation and been named a 2021 Finalist for the National Book Award.