The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture

The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture PDF Author: Paula M. Varsano
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438463049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Get Book

Book Description
Considers the role of hiddenness in the history of cultural production in premodern China. This volume brings together fourteen essays that explore the role of hiddenness—as both an object and a mode of representation—in the history of cultural production in China from the Warring States Period (403–221 BCE) to the end of the Qing Dynasty (1911) and beyond. The rhetorical use of various forms of hiddenness makes its appearance in literary, political, philosophical, and religious writings, as well as in the visual arts. Working in fields as disparate as traditional Chinese literature, religion, philosophy, history, medicine, and art, the contributors attempt to characterize one of the fundamental signifying practices in traditional Chinese cultural production. In the process, they not only reveal otherwise obscure patterns connecting longstanding social, political, aesthetic, and epistemological practices, but also contribute to ongoing discussions—well beyond the field of China studies—regarding the representation and communicability of knowledge, as well as the practices controlling its dissemination.

The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture

The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture PDF Author: Paula M. Varsano
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438463049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Get Book

Book Description
Considers the role of hiddenness in the history of cultural production in premodern China. This volume brings together fourteen essays that explore the role of hiddenness—as both an object and a mode of representation—in the history of cultural production in China from the Warring States Period (403–221 BCE) to the end of the Qing Dynasty (1911) and beyond. The rhetorical use of various forms of hiddenness makes its appearance in literary, political, philosophical, and religious writings, as well as in the visual arts. Working in fields as disparate as traditional Chinese literature, religion, philosophy, history, medicine, and art, the contributors attempt to characterize one of the fundamental signifying practices in traditional Chinese cultural production. In the process, they not only reveal otherwise obscure patterns connecting longstanding social, political, aesthetic, and epistemological practices, but also contribute to ongoing discussions—well beyond the field of China studies—regarding the representation and communicability of knowledge, as well as the practices controlling its dissemination.

The History of Chinese Rhetoric

The History of Chinese Rhetoric PDF Author: Weixiao Wei
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000610764
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Get Book

Book Description
This book challenges the existing misconception that there was no rhetoric in ancient China. Instead, this book provides ample evidence from public speeches in the Xia dynasty and oracle bone inscriptions in the Shang dynasty to public debates about government policies in the Han dynasty to show that persuasive discourse and rudimentary rhetorical techniques already existed in ancient China. Using literary analysis and discourse analysis methods, this book explains how the Mandate of Heaven was inscribed at the core of Chinese rhetoric and has guided Chinese thoughts and expressions for centuries. This book also demonstrates Chinese rhetorical wisdom by extracting many concepts and terms related to language expression, persuasive speech, morality and virtue, life and philosophy, and so on from great Chinese literary works. Well-known names, such as Confucius, Laozi, Sima Qian, Liu Xie, Mozi, Hanfeizi, Guibuzi and so on, are all touched upon with their famous theory and sayings related to and explicated from the rhetorical perspective. Many surprising facts are found by the author and revealed in the book. For example, a thousand years ago, the Chinese author Liu Xie already found that all words have preferred lexical neighbors and structural environment. This is later on ‘discovered’ by corpus linguistics and illustrated, for example, by the concepts of collocation and pattern grammar. This book targets postgraduate students, teachers, researchers and scholars interested in advanced Chinese language and Chinese literature, history, and culture.

Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture

Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture PDF Author: Matthew Mewhinney
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031119223
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores how two early modern and two modern Japanese writers – Yosa Buson (1716–83), Ema Saikō (1787–1861), Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) – experimented with the poetic artifice afforded by the East Asian literati (bunjin) tradition, a repertoire of Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting. Their experiments generated a poetics of irony that transformed the lineaments of lyric expression in literati culture and advanced the emergence of modern prose poetry in Japanese literature. Through rigorous close readings, this study changes our understanding of the relationship between lyric form and the representation of self, sense, and feeling in Japanese poetic writing from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. The book aims to reach a broad audience, including specialists in East Asian Studies, Anglophone literary studies, and Comparative Literature.

Designing Boundaries in Early China

Designing Boundaries in Early China PDF Author: Garret Pagenstecher Olberding
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316513696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Get Book

Book Description
Explores how sovereign space in early China was imagined and negotiated in the ancient world.

What China and India Once Were

What China and India Once Were PDF Author: Benjamin Elman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book

Book Description
In the early years of the twenty-first century, China and India have emerged as world powers. In many respects, this is a return to the historical norm for both countries. For much of the early modern period, China and India were global leaders in a variety of ways. In this book, prominent scholars seek to understand modern China and India through an unprecedented comparative analysis of their long histories. Using new sources, making new connections, and reexamining old assumptions, noted scholars of China and India pair up in each chapter to tackle major questions by combining their expertise. What China and India Once Were details how these two cultural giants arrived at their present state, considers their commonalities and divergences, assesses what is at stake in their comparison, and, more widely, questions whether European modernity provides useful contrasts. In jointly composed chapters, contributors explore ecology, polity, gender relations, religion, literature, science and technology, and more, to provide the richest comparative account ever offered of China and India before the modern era. What China and India Once Were establishes innovative frameworks for understanding the historical and cultural roots of East and South Asia in global context, drawing on the variety of Asian pasts to offer new ways of thinking about Asian presents.

Fixing Landscape

Fixing Landscape PDF Author: Corey Byrnes
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book

Book Description
In 1994, workers broke ground on China’s Three Gorges Dam. By its completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape immortalized in centuries of literature and art. The controversial history of the dam is well known; what this book uncovers are its unexpected connections to the cultural traditions it seems to sever. By reconsidering the dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Three Gorges region over more than two millennia, Fixing Landscape offers radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China. Corey Byrnes argues that this monumental feat of engineering can only be understood by confronting its status as a techno-poetic act, a form of landscaping indebted to both the technical knowledge of engineers and to the poetic legacies of the Gorges as cultural site. Synthesizing methods drawn from premodern, modern, and contemporary Chinese studies, as well as from critical geography, art history, and the environmental humanities, Byrnes offers innovative readings of eighth-century poetry, paintings from the twelfth through twenty-first centuries, contemporary film, nineteenth-century British travelogues, and Chinese and Western maps, among other sources. Fixing Landscape shows that premodern poetry and visual art have something urgent to tell us about a contemporary experiment in spatial production. Poems and paintings may not build dams, but Byrnes argues that the Three Gorges Dam would not exist as we know it without them.

Religion and Prison Art in Ming China (1368-1644)

Religion and Prison Art in Ming China (1368-1644) PDF Author: Ying Zhang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004432299
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 108

Get Book

Book Description
Approaching the prison as a creative environment and imprisoned officials as creative subjects in Ming China (1368-1644), Ying Zhang introduces important themes at the intersection of premodern Chinese religion, poetry, and visual and material culture.

Ten Lessons in Modern Chinese History

Ten Lessons in Modern Chinese History PDF Author: Zheng Yangwen
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526126974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book

Book Description
This book is a timely and solid portrait of modern China from the First Opium War to the Xi Jinping era. Unlike the handful of existing textbooks that only provide narratives, this textbook fashions a new and practical way to study modern China. Written exclusively for university students, A-level or high school teachers and students, it uses primary sources to tell the story of China and introduces them to existing scholarship and academic debate so they can conduct independent research for their essays and dissertations. This book will be required reading for students who embark on the study of Chinese history, politics, economics, diaspora, sociology, literature, cultural, urban and women’s studies. It would be essential reading to journalists, NGO workers, diplomats, government officials, businessmen and travellers.

The Worlds of Classical Chinese Aesthetics

The Worlds of Classical Chinese Aesthetics PDF Author: Paul R. Goldin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003861334
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book

Book Description
This book presents the foundations of classical Chinese aesthetic discourse - roughly from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages - with the following animating questions: What is art? Why do we produce it? How do we judge it? The arts that garnered the most theoretical attention during this time period were music, poetry, calligraphy, and painting, and this book considers the reasons why these four were privileged. Whereas modern artists most likely consider themselves musicians or poets or calligraphers or painters or sculptors or architects, the pre-modern authors who produced the literature that established Chinese aesthetics prided themselves on being wenren, “cultured people,” conversant with all forms of art and learning. Other comparisons with Western theories and works of art are presented at due junctures. Key Features Addresses Chinese aesthetic discourse on its own terms Provides comparisons of key concepts and theories with examples from Western sources Includes more coverage of primary sources than any other English-language book on the subject Each chapter opens with a helpful summary, highlighting the chapter’s key themes

The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE - 800 CE

The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE - 800 CE PDF Author: Robert Ford Campany
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176425
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book

Book Description
Dreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape—an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke—that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions. In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to questions peoples the world over have asked for millennia: What happens when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and nonhuman animals? The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE – 800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated these mysteries and brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures, ancient and contemporary. Taking stock of how Chinese people wrestled with—and celebrated—the strangeness of dreams, Campany asks us to reflect on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming.