Eugene-Springfield—Wednesday, June 5, 1:30–3:30 p.m.
Traditional Chinese literary theory considers poetry the result of a dramatic encounter between the agitated interior of the poet’s mind and the sensuous, alluring forces in the physical world, a perfect fusion of mind and nature or, in Chinese literary terms, qing and jing. Traditional theories, however, do not ask the question of how this poetic mind is constituted, or how the description of nature relates to the social and historical world in which the poet lives and writes. Equipped with recent theories on the social and cultural construction of human emotions, especially a better understanding of the key role the human body plays in mediating and shaping our intellectual and imaginative experiences, this talk explores the historical, material cultural, and, above all, bodily dimensions of the self-expressive thesis of classical Chinese poetry.
Yugen Wang is associate professor of Chinese literature at the University of Oregon. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 2005. He is author of several articles on classical Chinese poetry and of, most recently, Ten Thousand Scrolls: Reading and Writing in the Poetics of Huang Tingjian and the Late Northern Song (Harvard University Press, 2011), a study of how the nascent print culture of the eleventh century in China affected the poetic theory and practice of the leading writers of the time. His current project, of which the OLLI talk is a part, studies the historical and cultural changes in the representations of nature in classical Chinese poetry from the third to the eleventh centuries.
