THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.

LECTURE ABSTRACT

What do the Classics, bureaucratic memos, and vernacular fiction have in common? How can one write about writing without “taking the axe handle as a model”? What would it mean to understand literary writing as itself a material substrate, rather than a surface applied? The answers to these questions come together in an epistemic shift that begins in the Song, reaches its fullest realization in the late Ming, and echoes into the eighteenth century; a transformation that begins in everyday practice and conversations between teachers and students, and ends with the term wenzi (文字) striving to supplant wen (文) as a useful term of literary art. Central to this shift is the imagination of a general scope for textual labor, whether that labor defines itself against the material object worked, contends with cultural capital in the literary marketplace, or teases out meaning in interpretive projects.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alexander Des Forges is Professor of Chinese and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at University of Massachusetts - Boston. He is the author of two books, Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (University of Hawai'i Press, 2007) and Testing the Literary: Prose and the Aesthetic in Early Modern China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2021), and numerous articles on early modern comparative literature and cultural production, including “Burning with Reverence: The Economics and Aesthetics of Words in Qing China,” PMLA 121.1, “Sleights of Capital: Fantasies of Commensurability, Transparency, and a ‘Cultural Bourgeoisie,’” differences 24:3, and “Industry and its Motivations: Reading Tang Xianzu’s Examination Essay on the Problem of Excess Cloth,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 80.1.

CEAS LECTURE SERIES

The CEAS Lecture Series is an initiative that advances the University of Chicago's Center for East Asian Studies' mission in fostering dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration. This annual public lecture series presents eminent scholars who concentrate on the study of East Asia in a variety of disciplines. For more information on the series, follow the link here: https://ceas.uchicago.edu/events/ceas-lecture-series

SPONSORSHIP

This event is co-sponsored with the University of Chicago Library.

P HOTOGRAPHY/VIDEOGRAPHY

Please note that there may be photography taken during this educational event by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies for archival and publicity purposes. By attending this event, participants are confirming their permission to be photographed and the University of Chicago’s right to use, distribute, copy, and edit the recordings in any form of media for non-commercial, educational purposes, and to grant rights to third parties to do any of the foregoing.

CEAS Lecture Series ft. Alexander Des Forges