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Reevaluating the Classified Poetry of Dongpo with Hundred Critics’ Annotations: A Discussion of the Annotators’ Names Classified by Wang Wen-gou
Under the stereotypical impression as a forged publication made by booksellers, the Classified Poetry of Dongpo with Hundred Critics’ Annotations (abbr. as Hundred Critics’ Annotations) was hardly respected except as a rich collection of documents for hundreds of years. In fact, not only whether the Hundred Critics’ Annotations is completely a forged book made by booksellers remains discussible; but as one of the most important annotation books for Dongpo’s poetry that survived from Song Dynasty, its historical significance was irreplacable by later works or dissertations, even if they are more precise or profound than it. Based on the reorganization and classification of the so-called “the Hundred Annotators’ Names” made by Wang Wen-gou, a Ching Dynasty scholar, this article attempts to relate the Hundred Annotators to Wang Shi-pong (who was once identified as the editor of the book), to the Jiangxi poets, and to some of the most important academic and political elites in the transition period of Northern and Southern Song. The study, then, helps to reevaluate the significance of the Hundred Critics’ Annotations for the research of Su Shih and cultural history of Song Dynasty, as well as puts forth some valuable propositions for further reseach.
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Lee, Chen-huei |
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Attitudes of Three Fu on “Yushan” towards the Garden and Its Owner
During the end of the Ming dynasty, Qi Biaojia (祁彪佳) built his “Yushan” (寓山) garden in the outskirts of the city of Shanyin (山陰). Literati of the time participated in the interpretation of this garden with odes and reply-response pieces in a number of different styles. In addition to the large number of poem, and prose pieces, three works in the fu (賦) style written by Chen Dun (陳遯, date of birth and death unknown), Chen Hanhui (陳函輝, 1590-1646), and Chen Zilong (陳子龍, 1608-1647) have survived. This paper uses these three works in an effort to show the experimentation with and efforts put into writing fu on the subject of gardens by the literati of the late Ming. Three main questions are discussed. First, how did the relation between writer and owner affect the writing angle of three fu ? Second, how did fu written about gardens interpret the meaning invested in the space by the owner, and, particularly in light of the political situation of the time, how did the owner’s choice to either take office or stay out of public life affect the meanings imparted in the garden space? Third, given that literati during the late Ming did in fact use the fu style to write about gardens, how did they go about utilizing the characteristic of the fu as “stacking colors and layering shades, shaping objects and expressing thoughts (鋪采摛文，體物寫志)? In these works, the close connection of the garden with their owner brings to light the difference between this garden and the natural mountain terrain, while at the same time the writer’s relation to and understanding of the owner will also affect the perspective with which they look at the garden and their interpretation of it.
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Tsao, Shu-chuan
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The Poetics of Carnival in The Dream of the Red Chamber: A Study on Granny Liu
This article analyzes the role of Granny Liu in The Dream of the Red Chamber: as a mature-type old woman, she incarnates the spirit of carnival. I utilize Bakhtin’s poetics of carnival to explore the structural meanings of the episode of Granny Liu’ trip to Prospect Garden. First, through Granny Liu’s trip, an extraordinary festival space is built for the women and girls who live in the inner quarters of the Jia’s Family. Second, by playing a cheerful clown, Granny Liu creates an atmosphere of collective, public-square carnival. Third, Granny Liu emphasizes the material aspect and the lower part of body, bringing them to focus and center. Fourth, the words play in jiou-ling (酒令) games act as parody of the authority discourse. And with Granny Liu’s vernacular and vulgar colloquialism, a scene appears where art-language is confronted and deconstructed by life-language. Fifth, this episode is full of unpleasing or even dirty visions of grotesque animal figures and excrement. All these anti-sublime forces are against the idealized spiritual orientation of Prospect Garden, arousing Lin Dai-Yu’s abjection. Besides the contrasts and disturbances brought forth by Granny Liu, there is energetic and real force embodied in the spirit of carnival. It is exemplified in Granny Liu’s name-giving and saving of Ch’iao-jie, an episode of Sumpfzeugung（污泥生殖）
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Ou, Li-chuan
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From Wandering around the Island of Immortals to Envisioning the Perspective of Utopia: Spatial Imagination in Lu Sheng’s Chi Ren Shuo Meng Ji
In the late Qing era, the concepts of space were confronted with a changing geographical imagination that in turn affected literary expression. Focusing on Dream Talk of an Imbecile (Chiren shuo mengji), this article discusses the presentation of spatial transformation in the late Qing era under the impact of the “Great Age of Discovery.” First of all, it tracks the spatial imagination of the father-son relationship in the novel, thus exploring the shift from the traditional “island of immortals” (xianren dao) towards a modern vision of the “town of suppressed immortals” (zhen xian cheng). How did a new geographical vision – concepts such as the five continents and the nation-state – enter the novel’s space and affect its narrative? The characters must discover that tianxia, which they had taken granted for their home, does not at all belong to them; searching for a route of escape, they construct a new surreal space: Utopia.
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Guan, Kean-fung
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An Analysis of Ogy? Sorai’s Method of Interpretation of the Classics
This essay is meant to analyze how the influential thinker in the history of Tokugawa Japanese Confucianism, Ogy? Sorai (1666-1728), while interpreting the Confucian Classics, made much of “unspeakable” hermeneutic traits and the matters which arose therein. First, having analyzed how he based his scholarship on the study of old phrases and syntax in the Six Classics, the essay then points out that Sorai’s scholarship lay in the pursuance of the compatibility of the “term” with the “things” practiced by the early Confucian sage rulers. The “term” referred to the old phrases written in the texts prior to the Chin-Han period, namely, the language used in the Six Classics; the “things” were the objects the “term” referred to, that is to say, rites, music, law enforcement, and political administration, as noted in the Six Classics. Sorai held that only with the language matching objects it referred to, could one be allowed to discuss the philosophy of the early Confucian sage rulers and Confucius. Second, to explore Sorai’s “unspeakable” hermeneutic traits, the paper expounds (1) Sorai’s emphasis on the “unspeakable rites and music.” The term “unspeakable” here was used to emphasize the dynamic implications for the practice of rites and music. It was far different from the emphasis laid by Song Confucianists on the static implications in the language education on the basis of Neo-Confucianism; (2) Sorai’s use of the term “unspeakable” as a denial of the critical method for hermeneutics advanced by the later Confucians as “out of nothing.” He objected to their interpretation of the Classics via their fictional concepts such as “good human nature,” “divine principles and human desires,” and “inner sagacity and outer kingship.” He was opposed to their random interpretation of the Classics; and (3) Sorai’s own “unspeakable” intention to get rid of the tense hierarchical relations and to downplay the role of Yen Hui, in terms of his purposed, selective interpretation of passages in his A Reexamination of the Confucian Analects (《論語徵》). Last, the paper, based on the above-mentioned analysis of Sorai’s “unspeakable” hermeneutic traits, further points out the paradox formed in Sarai’s method of interpretation and the problems it gave rise to. That is to say, Sorai often nullified his own out-of-nothing principle of interpretation of the Classics and thus confined his interpretation of the Classics to the spectrum of particular meanings, ignoring the universal meaning of the Classics. This possibly stifled openness and innovation inasmuch as the interpretation of the Classics was concerned.
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Chang, Kun-chiang
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Ch?ng Yagyong’s Four Books Learning
This paper discusses Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130-1200)’s Four Books Learning (四書學) and how the 18th century Korean Confucian Ch?ng Yagyong (丁若鏞) overturned and rebuilt his own Four Books Learning. The special meanings that Zhu Xi gave to the Four Books not only helped him build a complete philosophical system, but also had the effect of changing the status of the other Confucian Classics. In Korea, Song Learning became important during the Kony? period. After that, every educated person studied the Four Books using Zhu Xi’s commentaries. During the middle and late periods of the Choson dynasty, the scholar Ch?ng Yagyong (also known as Tasan 茶山) began a new study of the Four Books. His study was different from the emphasis put by everyone else of the time on nature and principle, and was also different from that of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming (1472-1528) in China. Ch?ng’s interpretation of the Four Books seems to have overturned Zhu Xi’s Four Books Learning and rebuilt a new Four Books Learning based on his own views.
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Tsai, Chen-feng
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The Web of the “All-binding Law” in Measure for Measure: A Study of Its Mingled Yarn
Measure for Measure begins as a play that goes to the heart of some core questions for all concerned with the workings of civil laws. Various problems with law and government receive expression in the agonized human costs paid for the legalistic rigors, unruly license, ineffectual law enforcement, and the corruption of the authority rife in the world of the drama. To the end, it remains a struggle for the infirm hold of legal system to contain its recalcitrant human subjects. Meanwhile, a penumbra of divine laws looms large from the start of the play and comes into sharper focus before long. Precepts of the Christian New Law, which teach the lesson of non-judgmental, charitable love, move toward a transcending of the retributive justice endorsed by the Old Law and offer a positive reading of the idea of “measure for measure”. Aside from the ordering forces of the establishment, however, the play gives an equal role to the forces of discord, driven by relentless human carnality and the natural impulses to break loose. The debates about legal and theological issues are taken up in a jungle peopled by vividly conceived, full-blooded individuals who “want to live”. These individuals are held in leash by instinctual needs dictated by the human nature. Gripping drama comes out of the clashes between “the laws of nature” and the laws set down in heaven and on earth. Just when the conflict between sterile order and anarchic individualism looks like a deadlock, an entirely different set of rules, in the guise of Duke Vicentio, descend upon the scene and violently slam the untidy mass of troubles into the mode of traditional comedy. The force of comic conventions, while flaunting and mocking its own fictional nature, overrides other concerns and powerfully shapes the final part of the play. It is a basic assumption of this study that concerns with four different types of laws, like multiple strands in a mingled yarn, are woven into the fabric of Measure for Measure. Shakespeare explores the amplitude of the notion of the law by juxtaposing and knitting together these contrasting strands. The mingling of heterogeneous materials accounts for the play’s extraordinarily rough texture and shifting patterns. The ascendancy of comic conventions in the second part of the play, especially, gives the style a startling jolt and results in an unevenness in style that has long plagued the play’s critical reception. This study sets out to accomplish three tasks. First, it examines how Shakespeare, reworking his sources, has created greater scope for exploring law and its related questions in different directions. Second, it traces how each of the laws at issue has played its part, intertwining with contending forces, and enriching the play’s bold configurations. Third, drawing upon the interpretive efforts of critics who see different laws as the guiding principles of Measure for Measure, this study also reflects on the possible approaches to this riddling play.
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Hsieh, Chun-pai
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Life-world, Body and Art: Discussing Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bernhard Waldenfels and Contemporary Phenomenology
This essay focuses on two central concerns of contemporary phenomenology, i.e. “life-world” and “body”, to clarify the major shift having taken place within the phenomenological movement since its beginnings. Also, by explaining phenomena related to our bodily existence and to sense perception, it gives an introduction to the philosophical contribution by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Bernhard Waldenfels. In its third part, this essay draws on some concrete examples taken from the field of avant-garde art to illustrate the above mentioned issues in their relation with aesthetics. Finally, a new reading of the method of “descriptive phenomenology” in the sense of a continuous hermeneutic process called “transformative phenomenology” is proposed, by the way giving some hints regarding its connection with transcultural thinking and ethics.
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MathiasObert
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Ecological Utopia: A Study of Three Literary Utopias in the 1970s
Ecological utopia is a subgenre in the sphere of utopian literature. Its study demonstrates a new and significant dimension in utopian scholarship. The three 1970s ecological utopias under scrutiny─Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1979)─share the insight of ecological critics who are centrally concerned with corporate and technological exploitation of nature and the ensuing environmental degradation and extinction of species. These utopian texts swerve from the ideal of affluence and anthropocentric assumptions and turn to embrace an alternative vision, emphasizing the interconnectedness among humans and nature and the balance between economic pursuit and ecological concern. Nevertheless, in terms of their gender / class / racial politics, some ecological utopias tend to ignore or erase cultural inscriptions. Ecotopia expresses the 1970s environmental concern as filtered through the lens of a white patriarchy. The Wanderground endorses biological essentialism, envisioning a narrow, biological linkage between women and nature and celebrating ‘women’ at the expense of their intrinsic differences in terms of race and class. Woman on the Edge of Time, on the other hand, is unique in its problematization of the celebration of women per se and its understanding of the interconnectedness of gender / race / class / ecology. Against the myth of white / patriarchal / middle-class environmentalism, the work demonstrates how environmental justice may involve considerations along the axes of gender / race / class.
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Chang, Hui-chuan
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Between Apocalyptic Violence and Cosmopolitan Spirit(s): Waging Justice War in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead
This essay attempts to analyze how the discourse of terrorism (i.e. the extreme form of violence with political content) is intertwined with Native American claims for sacred land, assertion for rights to free migration and fight for ecological justice. It will also address the political and ethical complexities of the long-standing historical struggle not merely in terms of indigenous discourse, but against the contour of both colonial memory of holocaust and the rampant invasion of neocolonialism manifested in various forms of transnational technology. I would argue that Leslie Marmon Silko standing on the ground of indigenism is actually oscillating between the ideals of tribalism and cosmopolitanism. In other words, in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, tribal history is evoked to challenge the dominant hegemonic discourse and ideology, whereas cosmopolitan spirit(s) is recognized as that which has already been inscribed into the mind of Native people since time immemorial.
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Chang, Yueh-chen
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