Dartmouth Events

Is This “Chinese Literature”?

Part of the backdrop of this question is, of course, the way colleagues, students, and especially institutions constantly imply to scholars in my field that what we study is extraordinarily narrow, even niche. How then should we study a playing card like this one, so familiar to most of the people on the planet? The direct ancestors of this card emerged out of an engagement with the paper money widely circulated by the Yuan dynasty under Kublai Khan (1260 and afterwards). So should we consider it Chinese at all? And can we consider it literature? Often by default the work of studying literature devolves into uncovering individual motivations, but I will argue that its main work is post-Freudian and post-Marxian, to recuperate and realienate the familiar.

Speaker bio:

Professor Tina Lu is the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of East Asian Languages & Literatures and the Head of Pauli Murray College at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on the literature of the late imperial period, from around 1550 to around 1750. Her major publications include Persons, Roles and Minds (Stanford, 2001), Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2009), a book-length chapter on late Ming literary culture in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, v.2, and a co-edited volume on Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone (MLA).

Co-sponsored by the Society of Fellows and Department of Asian Societies Cultures & Languages