ZOOM:

• Please email a.benedicty@uva.nl for the Zoom link and the reading.
• You may also come to room PCH 1.04 to join the class, where we will Zoom-in the speaker on the larger screen.

Talk description:

Although the Chinese literary tradition evolved from a “stimulus-response” rather than mimetic model of poetic production, it also developed sophisticated frameworks for contemplating art’s relationship to truth. This talk uses Tang Xianzu’s (1550-1616) celebrated drama The Peony Pavilion (1598) to illustrate a characteristically Chinese approach to the representation of reality. Focusing on the scenes in which the female protagonist’s self-portrait plays pivotal roles, I demonstrate how the playwright mobilizes the language of classical pictorial criticism to champion a form of “true likeness” that is rooted in spiritual affinity, rather than formal accuracy. I further show that the non-mimetic portrait, born from the heroine’s attempt to capture a spring-stirred erotic dream, embodies the otherwise abstract concept of qing (passion, sentiments, feelings, emotions, etc.), which was elevated to an unprecedented height in late Ming intellectual discourse. By enabling the female protagonist to transcend the boundary between life and death, the portrait plays a crucial role in the play’s celebration of qing as the most effective and cohesive force in a cosmos replete with affective resonances. Moreover, given that this cosmological model has been frequently evoked to explain the absence of mimetic theory in China, this talk contributes to a productive comparison between Eastern and Western theories about the representation of reality. 

Biography:

Shengyu WANG is a scholar specializing in the literary and cultural history of late imperial China (from ca. 1500 to 1911). His research explores the intersections of anomaly literature, vernacular religion, esoteric traditions, and visual culture. His recent projects have been supported by fellowships from University of Heidelberg, the Needham Research Institute, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. He has published peer-reviewed articles on diverse topics including ghost stories, human-animal relations, crime and punishment, the translation of Chinese folklore in nineteenth-century Europe, and early periodical literature in China. In addition to original research, he has also translated numerous works from classical Chinese into English. 

This conversation is hosted by Literary and Cultural Analysis department at the UvA, in the context of the undergraduate course Contesting Critical Histories, taught by Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Niall Martin.