Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to China

Early Chinese writings from around the 10th century BCE to the 2nd century CE display a distinctive preference for the oral word. Across the genre spectrum, a text is oftentimes nothing but a speech or dialogue, minimally contextualized. When more narrative background is given, speech somehow carries the most weight in storytelling. My book seeks to provide the first account of this, I argue, literary and aesthetic phenomenon in early China. It shows how writing imagines, regulates, and valorizes the oral word and, in turn, derives its own discursive authority from the oral form. As such, it models a literary-critical approach to a problem conventionally dealt with philologically. Instead of asking who is speaking, whether the words uttered are authentic, or how writing managed to capture them, I invite readers to consider the oral as a literary construct. In light of how Comparative Literature has been trying to reconceptualize the relationship between writing and orality, my book shows that the two constitute a dialectic about representation.