SESSION: CLASSICAL VS./ VERNACULAR CULTURES

Mixing, Conflicting and Reconciling: The Characteristics of Knowledge in Vernacular Fictions by Ming and Qing Literati

Wu Feipeng

Wu Feipeng, associate professor of College of Chinese Language and Literature, Fujian Normal University (Fuzhou, China). Degrees: PHD, 2021, Peking University; MA, 2017, Peking University; BA, 2014, Peking University. Research Interests: Chinese literature of late imperial period, with special attention to fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Recent Achievements: The doctoral dissertation completed in June 2021, with the title of “Spirit of Literati in Vernacular Story in the 17th - 18th Century”, discussing the mentality, knowledge, ideals and imagination of readers of literati who are interested in participating in vernacular literature.

Abstract — When literati write vernacular stories, they not only quoted a large number of Confucian sayings, but also various folk sayings. The latter can sometimes be used to complement the former, but sometimes contradict the former, which shows that folk sayings are not always morally good as a summary of experience. Yet literati still used them by ‘quoting', a rhetotic involving the tradition of using Confucian sayings that gives authority to guide action. Analyzing this phenomenon may help us understand the attitude and strategy of literati towards knowledge of different natures. There are many intellectual elements in the vernacular stories written by literati that cannot be tolerated in the orthodox context, which shows the specific intellectual desire and interest of this group. However, due to the relatively conservative ethical values and the purpose of educating the people, the desire for konwledge expression was restrained, and at the same time, several sepecial forms of expression were widely used. From this perspective, we may be better able to explain why pornography is always combined with verse. In their writing, these literati writers were also devoted to reflecting on the gains and losses of theoretical knowledge given by Confucian education by comparing with practical knowledge and experience in everyday life worlds. As a result, a type of story with the theme of honing the nerd was born, which was specially aimed at readers who lacked the ability to live. It also entrusts the ideal personalities of these literati writers: a new type of intellectual elite with both ideal pursuit and survival skills. The above discusses the mixing, conflicting and reconciling of knowledge in vernacular stories by literati. This essentially reflects the continuous struggle of different ideologies in the spiritual world of some intellectual elites when they turned to the secular since the mid-Ming Dynasty.

Communication between literary tradition and vernacular culture in Pinhua baojian 品花寶鑑 (Precious Mirror for Judging Flowers), an archive of social intercourse between literati and male actor-courtesans

Wu Weihang

CRCAO ( France), 2 - Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE-PSL) ( France) — Wu Weihang is a PhD candidate at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, France. Her doctoral thesis examines the relationship between imperial examination system and literary creation in late imperial China.

Abstract — Pinhua Baojian 品花寶鑑 (Precious Mirror for Judging flowers) by Chen Sen 陳 森 (ca. 1796-1870), generally regarded as a typical idealized type of courtesan novel (xiaxie xiaoshuo 狹邪小説), reflects an important part of lifestyle of many literati at the time. It can therefore be compared to an archive of literati's social intercourse with male dan 旦（boy actor of female roles in opera）in mid-to-late Qing period. This paper investigates and analyzes how Chen Sen developed a multilayered communication between the literary tradition and the vernacular knowledge in three aspects: the narrative structure, the language registers, and the values and conceptions.

Xixiang ji as Popular Knowledge: Lyric and Visual Superfluity in The Western Wing with Red-Ink Commentary (Zhuding Xixiang ji 硃订西厢记)

Wu Yinghui

Yinghui Wu is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at University of California, Los Angeles. Her main field of interest is late imperial Chinese literature with a focus on drama, print culture, and popular culture. She has published on topics such as playful eight-legged essays as commentary and parody of popular plays, representations of emotions in late Ming brothel manuals, etc. She is a co-editor of Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual (1600-1850): Between East and West (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and is currently completing her first monograph titled Reading Drama in Seventeenth-Century China: Between Text, Image, and Sound.

Abstract — Browsing through the over forty editions of Xixiang ji survived from the late Ming, we encounter not only the richest variety of commentaries and illustrations but also miscellaneous spin-offs from the play, in the form of poems, songs, essays, drinking games, etc. The latter group of materials was often overlooked in scholarship, but I argue that they performed a significant role in the spreading of popular knowledge surrounding Xixiang ji and the increasingly diversifying functions of this knowledge among late Ming readers. This case study explore a rare edition of Xixiang ji —The Western Wing with Red-Ink Commentary (most likely dated to the Chongzhen period)— as an “patchwork” edition that copied and adapted from a wide range of textual and visual materials. The most distinguishing feature of this edition was its use of Poems from the East of Pu (Pudong shi 蒲东诗), a group of “vulgar” poems frequently attached to Xixiang ji editions, as a poetic index to illustrations to create a series of narrative pictures of superfluous details and visual excess. Poems from the East of Pu is a series of literarily unsophisticated poems written in a first-person voice that shifts among the perspectives of different characters of the play. Poetic captions taken from Poems from the East of Pu served to string together disparate images culled from multiple sources, creating the effect of a rambling, multifocal visual narrative that often digresses from the main storyline and elaborates on minor details. As the main appeal of the edition, illustrations took precedence over the play, challenged the reader's memory of Xixiang ji by mixing it up with the supplementary narrative of Poems from the East of Pu, and led to expanded experience with Xixiang ji not as a single text but as a mixture of “high” and “low” cultural products.

SESSION: SHIFTING FORMS OF VERNACULAR KNOWLEDGE

Jokes as a site of social knowledge and historical consciousness: Some methodological pointers

Elizabeth Smithrosser

International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden ( Netherlands) — Elizabeth Smithrosser obtained her doctoral degree from the University of Oxford in November 2021. She will be a Fellow at IIAS, Leiden from February 2022, preparing a translation of three pre-modern Chinese jokebooks for Oxford University Press and a monograph on the humour publishing scene in late-Ming China. She also writes a monthly column on Tang-Song topics for Medievalists.net.

Abstract — Jokes and humour feature prominently throughout late imperial Chinese literature, yet academic leanings and prejudices have historically left them subject to neglect or trivialisation. On the one hand, this means there is a huge trove of material that is yet to be explored to its full potential, but on the other, it has left our scholarly toolkit ill-equipped for the purpose. Humour is notoriously slippery, both to define as a concept and to draw historical and literary conclusions from. The humorous voice is inherently many-layered and can be a minefield of indirectness, silliness, tongue-in-cheek remarks and sarcasm, leaving it tricky to summon anything concrete with regard to what the text hopes to convey. But it is not impossible. This paper will draw upon the author's experience in foregrounding late-Ming humour as a focus of study to outline some of the difficulties encountered working with humorous material. It will suggest a tentative set of methodological best practices, with reference to various Ming examples in both classical and vernacular Chinese. Meanwhile, it will demonstrate how the “gap” inherent to the specific textual formula of a joke can be mined as a site of historical knowledge. Unlike many other kinds of text, a joke deliberately omits information and in doing so demands knowledge from the reader/listener as opposed to straightforwardly providing it. Jokes therefore have the advantage of enabling the historian to reconstruct what kind of knowledge was expected to exist in the minds of readers, rather than simply with what knowledge a given text intended to equip them. 

Casual collections: Popular manuscript anthologies from Shandong

Lu Zhenzhen

Bates College ( United States) — Zhenzhen Lu is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Bates College (Maine, USA). She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 with a dissertation on vernacular works attributed to Pu Songling (1640-1715), which she is presently revising into a book. She has also published articles on the production of entertainment literature in 19th century Beijing (particularly in the genre of zidishu). She is interested broadly in the practices of reading, writing, publishing and performance in late imperial China, and maintains active interests in comparative manuscript studies and the histories of print and popular culture in East Asia.

Abstract — If premodern Chinese vernacular literature is an archive of knowledge, manuscript miscellanies—handwritten collections of texts of diverse genre and authorship—form the physical archives that are often responsible for transmitting them. In other cultures and contexts, such manuscripts have been studied in connection to multilingualism and processes of canonization, being open containers of texts and knowledge. In late imperial China, while much scholarly attention has been devoted to the printed canon of vernacular literature, still little is understood about the creation and circulation of vernacular texts in other realms. This paper examines a group of manuscript miscellanies from rural Shandong, probably made for personal use by village scholars some time during the Qing and Republican eras. Containing diverse assortments of texts, these casual collections reveal a fluid and highly miscellaneous textual realm, with content ranging from classical poetry and prose to colloquial songs and riddles, from ballads and plays for entertainment to written communications for practical use. While many texts played upon well-known stories and shared literary knowledge, the manuscripts were also repositories of local writing, including vernacular songs and stories, some of which have been attributed to the Shandong writer Pu Songling (1640-1715). With attention to the content of these texts as well as the reading marks, corrections, scribbles, and occasional authorship attributions accompanying them, I show how the miscellanies captured an informal realm of textual activity that is parallel, if sometimes overlapping with that of formal literary anthologies also found in the area. They offer much food for thought on the local contexts of Chinese vernacular literature(s), as well as the fluid relationship between classical and vernacular in the worlds of village scholars.

 

Mistaken Identity and the Representations of Performance in a Yuan Sanqu Song

Karin Myhre

Karin Myhre ( U.S. Outlying Islands) — Dr. Karin Myhre is Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies at the University of Georgia. She received her Ph.D. in Chinese literature from the Department of East Asian Languages at the University of California at Berkeley and has had the opportunity to live and conduct research in China, Taiwan, and Japan. Her interests include drama and performance of the Song through Ming periods and she has published on Chinese wit and humor, representations of ghosts and monsters, and images of demons and deities.

Abstract — Literary production in the Yuan period (1279-1368), in addition to exhibiting a new breadth of linguistic register, shows a broadening in the range of authors, topics and treatments (Sieber 2014, West 2010). In some measure it was the circulation of languages and cultures in a multi-ethnic Yuan empire which created space for dramatic songs to adopt more vernacular phrasings and engage a range of subjects that might have been remarkable in another time. While this shift toward candor and more forthright diction might well have led to a championing of transparency, instead, and somewhat perversely, a motif repeated through a number of works concerns not the ease of communication across newly breached boundaries, but rather its difficulty.  Du Renjie's 杜仁傑 (杜善夫 ca. 1201-1283) portrayal of communicative incompetence in “The Bumpkin Does Not Know Theater” 莊家不識勾欄 reads at the surface level as an anecdotal account of the theatrical misadventures of a hapless country bumpkin. But closer analysis demonstrates the poem's complex engagements with broader issues of representation in both the dramatic and social spheres. Questions engaged through this complex piece, including the fungibility of the identities of actor and character, and the merging and shifting positions of author, reader, player and spectator, trace matters central to later Ming and Qing literature already evident in Yuan vernacular songs.