History of the Classical Studies in China

The goal and purpose of this course is to help the students grasp the main points of the change and vicissitude of the classical studies in all previous dynasties. Through the lecturing from the instructor and the discussion in the class, students should be able to obtain the ability to solve problems in conducting the research of the history of the classical study. We will be focusing on the issue of the development of academic as a whole and the view point of cultural history for the exploration of this subject. In another words, base on the view point of history we intend to explore the objective truth of the development of classical study of each era. In modern era, the elaboration on the history of classical study is plenty and branched, but the distortion is in the majority. It is mainly due to the limited material from the pre-Chin era--thus, studies on this topic were mostly depending on the ‘saying’ from scholars of Han. Unfortunately, the interpretation on these ‘saying’ always differed from scholars to scholars. Moreover, the interpretation were easily confined to a particular school of learning, thus, scholars usually would be holding biased point of view toward others’. Therefore, to those interpretations on classical studies that were not in accordance with the fact, we consider it as an important task in the class to clarify with.
The content of this course will be divided into two major parts: issues emerged during the pre-Chin to the Two- Han Dynasty will be explored in the first semester; issues emerged during the Wei-Jin era to the modern age will be discussed in the second semester.
There has not been any appropriate and ideal textbook to serve the need of our exploration in this course nowadays; however, we are going to rely on several reference books that are available: Pi Hsi-Rei’s ‘Jing Shueih Li Shih’ (History of Classical Studies), Ma Tzong-Huo’s ‘Chung Kuo Jing Shueih Shih’ (History of Classical Study of China) , Ben Tien Chen Chih’s ‘Chung Kuo Jing Shueih Shih’ (History of Classical Study of China), the collective works by An Jing Hsiao Tai Lan and others ‘Chung Kuo Jing Shueih Shih’ (History of Classical Study). Other relevant references will be printed and distributed for each session. Students should complete a written report as the basis of the grading.