Chinese Studies Commons^™

嶺南大學漢學國際研討會暨《嶺南學報》復刊工作會議綜述, Zhan Huang

嶺南大學漢學國際研討會暨《嶺南學報》復刊工作會議 International Conference on Sinology at Lingnan University

2013年11月1-2日，嶺南大學漢學國際研討會暨《嶺南學報》復刊工作會議在香港嶺南大學隆重召開。是次會議由嶺南大學中文系主辦，來自中國大陸、香港、臺灣及海外地區的四十餘位學者出席會議。11月1日上午，嶺南大學中文系系主任許子東教授主持了會議開幕禮，鄭國漢校長致開幕辭。中文系講座教授、學報籌委會主席蔡宗齊教授向與會學者彙報了《嶺南學報》復刊籌備工作的進展。北京大學袁行霈教授作了題爲的書面主題報告。這次會議是為重新籌辦有著八十多年歷史、因種種原因而停刊的《嶺南學報》一事而召開的。研討主題只以漢學（國學）為限，這一設定為與會學者創造了最大的發揮空間。學者可以就個人研究興趣自由選題，提交論文。

Maneuvering Modernity: Family Law As A Battle Field In Colonial Taiwan (1895-1945), Yun-Ru Chen

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Twenty five years after launching its own legal modernization in response to Western imperialism, Japan imposed a modern legal system upon its first colony, Taiwan. In accordance with the “respecting old custom” colonial policy, the Japanese created a system called Taiwanese customary law, a mixture of imperial Chinese laws, local customs and European legal concepts, and gradually implemented its newly adopted European-style Meiji Civil Code (1898). However, even since the late 1910s when the colonial policy changed into “full-flag assimilation,” family law remained an exception to the transplantation of Japanese laws. That did not, however, mean that family law was …

Painting Taiwan's Modern Identity, Shelley D. Hawks

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Taiwan’s painters were dynamic contributors to a revolution in color that dramatically reshaped East Asian art. During the early twentieth century, new techniques of on-site sketching and the introduction of oil paint shook the foundations of Chinese and Japanese ink painting as it had been practiced for centuries. The Japanese colonization of Taiwan, a period when educators such as Ishikawa systematically introduced European painting methods, produced a cohort of painters in Taiwan professionally trained and committed to watercolor and oil painting. Building on international art trends like Impressionism and Fauvism, these painters developed a sense of color distinctly their own. …

Aesthetic Beauty In The 18th Century Chinese Novel Guwanyan (Preposterous Words), Qing Ye

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper explores the tension between the radical sexual description and orthodox rhetoric in 18th century Chinese vernacular narrative. My research focuses on a xiaoshuo fiction, Guwangyan (Preposterous Words), authored by Cao Qujing and composed in 1730. This novel pictures the domestic lives of four families in Nanjing from the end of the 17th century to the early 18th century, including many explicit sexual descriptions. I argue that the author projects the ethic concern through the structure and characterization, while presents the anxiety towards desire in graphic sexual descriptions in the novel. The contrast and complementarity of the structural frame …

Absent Presence: Li Yu’S Drama Wanli Yuan And Early Qing Sartorial Politics, Guojun Wang

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Li Yu’s 李玉 Wanli yuan 萬里圓 (Thousand-li Reunion) is one of the few dramas in the early Qing period that directly addresses the topic of the Ming-Qing transition. Although Wanli yuan was never published in its entirety during the Qing Dynasty, its popular scenes circulated widely on stage, resulting in a series of “performance editions.” Oriented toward stage performance, most of Li Yu’s plays include detailed costume instruction. By contrast, almost none of the extant editions of Wanli yuan includes any costume instruction. Despite this absence, the dialogues and stage directions of the extant performance editions show that different scenes …

Searching In The Dark - Han Learning And The Controversy Of 1799 Metropolitan Exam, Shiu On Chu

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper investigates the introduction of Han Learning (hanxue 漢學) in Qing civil examinations from an institutional perspective. Focusing on the controversy over the 1799 metropolitan examination, I argue that hanxue was resisted not only by the intellectual orthodoxy Cheng-Zhu learning, but also a concept of “proper advancement” (zhengtu 正途) from examination.

The 1799 metropolitan examination was often seen as a triumph of Han Learning because the chief examiners Zhu Gui (朱珪1731-1806) and Ruan Yuan (阮元1764-1849), who were famous patrons of Han scholarship, awarded degrees to a number of established Han scholars. Contemporaries attributed this high rate of …

文苑 (重刊號第13期), 第十七屆嶺南大學學生會中文系系會 (朔翹)

文苑

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Field And Factory: Chinese Revolutionary Posters, Molly E. Reynolds

Schmucker Art Catalogs

The images on display for Field and Factory, political propaganda used by the Communist Party of China during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, construct a fictitious world. In perceiving these kinds of illustrations, the audience is asked either to visualize the society in its ideal form or unify in opposition to a national enemy. In the first half of the twentieth century, before the possibilities of the television advertisement were fully realized, posters were one of the most popular forms of propaganda: cheap to produce in mass quantities and simple enough to hang in any public building. The art form’s …

張愛玲的自我改寫 : 以《紅樓夢魘》為觀察視角, Ruqin Liu

Lingnan Theses

《紅樓夢》是張愛玲畢生寫作的繆思。在不同的創作階段，《紅樓夢》所奉於張愛玲的靈感是有所差別的。重讀《紅樓夢》是張愛玲離滬後第二個創作生命的重要經驗，對照其心路歷程與書寫經驗，形成一種新的文學視域和價值尺度。

1977 年出版的《紅樓夢魘》，以不同版本為參照，「改寫」面貌始終是張氏關注的焦點。與此同時，張愛玲自身也在不斷重寫、改寫自己的作品，《紅樓夢》考據給予她重寫生命的養分和動力。透過關涉文學評述與創作的微妙互動，可觀察到張愛玲藉由對《紅樓夢》的思考與推測，内化為自己的改寫意識，形諸創作當中。離滬後張氏因應文化場域的轉變，「改寫」又可以說是夾雜對生存與聲譽的擔憂，權衡寫作技法與政治禁忌的兩難之下，所作出的適應與妥協。本文擬以《紅樓夢魘》為觀察視角審顧張氏作品的改寫面貌和改寫策略，並探討其改寫因由與改寫效果。

A Tale Of Two Needles, Chengyi Liu

SURGE

Looking back, I guess the name should have been my first clue. “Alternative” medicine? “Complementary” medicine? What is it about these medical practices, which to me are completely traditional, that places them in a secondary position to other medicinal options in the United States? [excerpt]

Manchu Shamanist Mythology And Ecological Aesthetics, Lijie Yan

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Manchu traditional culture of fishing and hunting has maintained a relation of harmonic multi-dimensional coexistence with its natural environment. Shamanic mythology has an animistic philosophical foundation with a primitive poetic thinking, holding nature in awe and veneration. Through constant communication with nature, the human beings are situated in the ecological system, and this means that Manchu life had an ecological aesthetics dimension since early. Manchu shamanism advocates animism, the unity of heaven and earth, and the identity of object and self. In shamanic mythology, the human interacts and keeps a kinship with the nature. Shamans communicate with the human and …

Marx And The Problems Of 20th Century Aesthetics, Zhenglong Wang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Marx's shift of focuses first from the essence of beauty to the formation of beauty and then from the relationship between art, society and life to the liberation feeling and sensibility undermines the traditional aesthetics from the metaphysical aspect and promotes the liberation of sensibility in the 20th-century aesthetics. Marx's political economy reveals various contradictions of capitalist industrial civilization and constructs a perspective of critique and methodology to analyze the capitalist culture, which establishes the foundation for the socio-cultural turn of criticism in the 20th-century aesthetics. The relations dealt with in Marx's aesthetics have been developed, revised, and questioned or …

On Heidegger, Jameson Fredric, Yu Zhu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Heidegger's Being and Time could be considered as a project in which the translation of codes occupies a central place. As for the dialectical oppositions between "the ontic" and "the ontological", "authenticity" and "inauthenticity" etc. and the ultimate failure of translation of codes induced by the analysis of "Dasein", these conceptual operations could be grasped as a "language experiment". It is only through this movement of "transcoding" that we could approach the historical specificity of Heidegger's thought and understand his political commitment and ideological significance of his philosophical discourse.

The Conception Of Canonization InThree Hundred Tang Poems, Honglin Wang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The paper argues that Three Hundred Tang Poems was compiled on the basis of the first edition of A Collection of Differentiated Tang Poems (Tang Shi Bie Cai Ji) in terms of the number of overlapped poems in both books and of the similarity of their compilation style and principles. The selection of Three Hundred Tang Poems shows that it lays equal emphasis on the educational function and the artistic appeal of poetry. It continues to accolade the High Tang poetry as An Collection of Differentiated Tang Poems did, while reducing the weight of the Early Tang poetry to highlight …

Delivered By Aesthetics: The Buddhist Taste In Wang Guowei's Comments On A Dream Of Red Mansions And The Symptoms Of His Aesthetic Thought, Hongxiang Xu, Wei Du

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Wang Guowei's Comments on A Dream of Red Mansions is far from a simple reproduction of Schopenhauer's philosophy and aesthetics. Wang incorporated his knowledge of Buddhism into the general structure of world academics, in which the individual's humanistic impulses to question the essence of life functioned as the local structures to push its smooth motion and modulate the dominant direction. Different aspects in life such as the attitude toward desire, the cognition of sufferings and the state of deliverance mirrored the mind-nature tradition of Chinese Buddhist thought, and "Buddhist taste" became both the background and intermediary of the fusion of …

Ecstasy And Writing: A Reflection On The Cultural Motif Of The Celestial Script, Yongping Li

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

In Plato's Dialogues, Socrates repeatedly claimed that poets were the inspired spokesmen of the god. In the Westernized context of modern disciplines, the function of story and lyrics becomes opaque and hard to understand. The so-called celestial script is an important cultural phenomenon, and from the perspective of literary anthropology, the motif of celestial script implies a long-standing tradition of oracle. The motif originates from the shaman ritual system of deity-communication, divination, disaster-prevention, evocation, and healing. The celestial script bestowed by deities and the secondary oral cultural tradition fulfill the need of the primitive people for extraordinary knowledge, ability and …

Franco Moretti's Reconstructionist "New Theory Of Literary Evolution" And World Literary History, Yuping Wu, Hanwen Fang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This paper claims that Franco Moretti's "New Theory of Literary Evolution" as one of the subjectivity theories behind the reconstruction of world literature history could be viewed as the reproduction in the postindustrial era of the evolution theory of literature in the 19th-century West. Although Darwin's evolution theory had profound impacts in the Western theory of social sciences, its limitations in epistemology and methodology have long been exposed and challenged. Moretti's plot-style interaction proposition takes into consideration formalist theory and the Western theory of world system, trying to reconstruct an innovative theory of world literature. The paper concludes that Moretti's …

Penglai, Cinnabar, And The Great Roc: The Presence Of Daoism In Du Fu's Poetry, Haoming Liu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This paper challenges the traditional stereotype of Du Fu as poet-sage by investigating his relationship to Daoism as is reflected in his poetry and in his life. It first discusses Du Fu's subscription to Daoism as a state ideology promoted by the Tang rulers and his representation of the court in Daoist paradisiacal imagery. It then moves to a discussion of the significance of Daoism to Du Fu as a personal faith and practice, with particular attention paid to his relationship with the doctrine of gold cinnabar. Finally, it investigates the nature and the meaning of the metamorphosis of the …

What Are The Consequences Of Literary Theory? Regarding To Stanley Fish's Non-Consequentialist Concept, Houliang Chen

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Literary theories have been long believed to have consequences. On the one hand, changes may be brought about in our reading experience and critical practices, and reforms may occur on the other. An entirely different argument, however, is raised by Stanley Fish, who claims that theory has no consequence because of its vain attempts to guide practice while taking a transcendental gesture so as to acquire a general hermeneutics of text from an absolutely impartial viewpoint. Literary theory is, therefore, a descriptive act of interpretation at best instead of an act of interpretation; hence, it cannot bring about any practical …

Cultural Turn And The Legitimacy Of The Theory Of Contemporary Chinese Aesthetic Ideology, Yanfeng Li

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This paper starts its investigation from the perspective of discourse legitimacy with respect to the structural transformation of contemporary social culture and the transfiguration of the mechanism of discourse production. It tries to trace the working logic underlying the historical development of the theory of aesthetic ideology and map out how its legitimacy is produced, ossified and trapped into crisis. The theory of aesthetic ideology was formed in the 1980s, and this paper takes its discursive structure, attribute and function as obvious symptoms of "modernity." Due to the fracture of "modernity," the transformation of socio-cultural structure and the transfiguration of …

How Can A Literary Theory Be In The Era Of Post Theories?, Wei Song

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Theoretical paradigm of modernity is met with unprecedented challenge and crisis, amid contemporary innovation and transformation of thoughts, thinking and discourse. Issues emerging from the post theory and "after theory" become important points for academic reflection. Post theories belong to the theoretical paradigm of postmodernity with a deconstructionist critical spirit. The reconstruction of literary theory in the era of post theories is not only a response and a critical questioning to contemporary cultural transformation, and the reality concern and critical dimension are the most demanding cultural-political issues in the process of the reconstruction.

The Gestation, Evolution And Cultural Implication Of The Concept Of "Author" In Ancient China, Chunqing Li

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The paper examines the development of the concept of "author" in ancient China from the pre-Qin to the Han-Wei Period. The trajectory can be found from Confucius's "explicating without writing down" to the claim that "the authors are too holy to be named" in The Book of Rites, and down to Cao Pi's "Jiayi could be named as a real author [on the basis that] his 'On the Qin's Governance' evaluated Zhou and Qin's merits and demerits, explicated the uninterpreted phenomena, exemplified with the mores from the past three dynasties and illuminated with the sages' teaching." This process, from the …

戰國文字構形特徵研究, Yan Ho Siu

Lingnan Theses

綜觀歷來的戰國文字研究，不少學者均主張依地域分系，學者何琳儀(1943-2007)將戰國文字分為齊、燕、晉、楚、秦五系，近代研究亦多取何氏的分域方法。學者李運富(1957-)認為，地域特點僅屬文字的書寫風格，不能作為分系的依據，質疑戰國文字的分域方法。何琳儀於其著作《戰國古文字典》與《戰國文字通論》中，嘗試列舉不同字例，以五系的分域方法，收集大量戰國文字的資料，概括構形的地域特點，唯何氏的論說未有對五系文字的特徵作更整體和深入的考察。基於前代學者的研究，本文以戰國文字為研究核心，透過構形的比較與歸納，補充近年出土的材料，嘗試從不同的角度，探討戰國文字的構形特徵與演變情況，論證戰國文字「東、西土分用」的說法以及劃分成五系的必要。

本文的主體部分共分五章。第二章從微觀的角度，依個別域系分類，逐一援引字列，分析當中的字符、部件，集中呈現各系的地域特徵。第三章同樣以域系作區分，嘗試通過整合與歸類，指出不同字符、部件的類化現象，嘗試凸現各系文字的相異之處。第四章集中比對「東土四系」(齊、燕、晉、楚)與「西土秦國」的文字，通過字例的展示，歸納彼此相異的構形，論證王國維(1877-1927)等學者主張戰國文字「東、西土分用」的說法。第五章以宏觀的角度，逐一展示、分析五系文字構形各異的個體字符，嘗試以相同的字例，說明五系文字各自存有的地域特徵。第六章以五系文字當中，構形同時相同與相異的字符為例，分析當中的異、同原因，了解五系文字的構形演變。

通過本文橫向與縱向的文字比對，可知五系文字的構形或受書寫材料影響，但當中演變並不受載體所限。戰國五系文字同源於殷周文字，經過程度不一的構形演變，加上各域系對文字所作具規範的整合，五系文字的構形越趨不同，地域特徵更為明顯，可證戰國文字有分作五系的必要。從本文的不同分類與探討，可見戰國文字存在「東、西土分用」的情況，但僅為當時文字構形異、同的現象之一。五系文字的構形異、同存在不同情況，表示戰國文字處於演變的階段，說明戰國五系文字「同中趨異」的現象。

A Further Reflection On The References Of Verbal Signs And Images, Jingpeng Zhao

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Language and writing are two different systems. Language as a system of sound symbols has the unique feature of containing "image" (verbal icon) in the sounds, and while writing, compared with the other images, are images that can be pronounced. A further reflection leads to the observation that the resemblance between the verbal icon and the referent can only decide the relation between the meaning and the referent but cannot undermine the arbitrary relationship between the pronunciation and the verbal icon or between the signifier and the signified. In other words, it cannot change the nature of the linguistic sign …

Aesthetic Anthropology Should Focus On The Aesthetic Connotation Of Ethnic Culture, Zheng Wang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This paper argues that aesthetic anthropological research should be directed at aesthetic ideas and their external forms of ethnic culture, as well as the general principles of the gestation, change and development of these ideas and forms. When the aesthetic contents of ethnic cultures are contaminated by industrial civilization and popular culture, with their unique core value increasingly undermined, aesthetic anthropology will lose ground of its academic focus. Aesthetic anthropology should aim to reveal the aesthetic connotation of ethnic cultures and maintain the positivist unique quality of anthropology.

Cleanth Brooks's Theory Of Fiction And His Critical Practice, Feiliang Fu, Shunqing Cao

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Cleanth Brooks' critical study on fiction, especially on William Faulkner's, is a remarkable achievement. Brooks claimed that there is no essential difference between fiction criticism, poetry criticism and drama criticism. In fiction criticism, Brooks' emphases remain on textual skills such as irony, paradox and symbol, taking fiction as an organism that should be independent of the social life and political propaganda, and opposing Romantic sentimentalism. Nevertheless, Brooks also lay great weight to the historical context and geographical environment of an author, emphasizing the influence of an author's life experience and entire body of works on a particular fiction, and attaching …

Discourse Power And The International Status Of Chinese Contemporary Literary And Art Theory, Shengxun Shi

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Discourse power is a problem emerged when Chinese art encounters the Western discourse hegemony. Theoretical expression is crucial to the acquisition and presence of the discourse power over art, while the discourse power over literature and art theory is essential to Chinese art discourse power. International status is an entailing problem of the internationality of discourse power and it encompasses discourse power into the global framework of totality. However, in the global framework of literary and art theory China remains silent, and thus the issue of the international status of Chinese literary and art theory emerges. Chinese theoretical scholars have …

From The Peach Blossom Fan ToThe Classic Of Mountains And Seas: A Way On Chinese Literature Of Professor Shi Ting-Quan (Richare E. Strassberg), Guozhong Peng

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Professor Shi Tingquan (Richare E. Strassberg) in UCLA had been exposed to Chinese culture in his childhood. Later, he studied in Princeton University for his Doctor's degree, his research was on K'ung Shang-ren's play The Peach Blossom Fan and later he wrote a book named The World of K'ung Shang-ren: A Man of Letters in Early Ch'ing China. In the book, he argued that K'ung put many things he had experienced into his play and made it into a semi-biographical play. K'ung's Peach Blossom Fan and the beautiful sceneries of the South Yangtze River depicted in this book further intrigued …

On The Tragic Consciousness Of Chinese Aesthetics, Zhirong Zhu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

In Chinese aesthetics, tragic consciousness shows as the poetic experience of a subject's empathy with objects, and this experience covers the bereavement or life-long separation, which may also reflect in the melancholic sense for the passing of spring and the coming of autumn in Chinese ancient literary works. The tragic consciousnesses of the literati, the hero and the female have their particular characteristics and inherent spirit. In ancient Chinese tragedies is seen a general transition of spirit from the heroic to the common and secular. On the one hand, this tragic consciousness is deeply influenced and constrained by Chinese cultural …

On The Ways For Literature To Pervade Reality, Xuan Wu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The paper raises the issue on how valid the traditional categorization of creative methods such as realism, romanticism and modernism can explain the uniqueness and originality of classical writers such as Dostoevsky and Lu Xun etc. It observes that classical writers have shared experience in the originality of literary creation which shows in their unique questions in philosophy or humanity targeting at the social reality of their own time while establishing their own understanding upon the questions and the understanding leads to the unique structuring of literary works. Therefore, a methodological schema can be found between individual concerns, personal understanding …