With the 2009-2010 year, we’re changing our name:

Literature, Theater, and Cultural History of China, 1500-Present

This site will remain available as an archive of our past activities, but all news for the current academic year will be posted on our new blog. Please visit and update bookmarks and addresses accordingly!

Co-sponsored by the Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia Workshop.

  4:30PM | CWAC | Room 152

Yuhang Li

PhD Candidate, EALC, University of Chicago

“Communicating Guanyin with Hair: Hair Embroidery in Late Imperial China”

Abstract: Hair embroidery is a particular technique practiced by lay Buddhist women to create devotional images during late imperial China.  The embroiderers used their own hair as threads to stitch figures on silk.  They particularly stitched Guanyin, the most prevalent female deity in China.  In recent works on women’s talent, scholars have cursorily mentioned hair embroidery, but they have failed to study it in detail. In this chapter, based on textual references and surviving hair embroidered Guanyin images, I explore the technique of hair embroidery, its religious connotations and then analyze the cultural significance of this practice.  When women embroidered these images of Guanyin, they would create an object out of their hair, and put the product embodying an intimate part of their bodies in temples for all to see.  In this way, women sought favors from Guanyin, asking her, for instance, to heal illness or demonstrate their filial piety towards their parents.  Thus by offering a part of themselves to Guanyin, they attempted to be close to her.  Investigating such practices sheds light on how intimate and non-intimate realms were constituted in relation to religious practice in late imperial China.

A Test of Love

Qing tan  情探

(Chinese subtitles)

Jiangnan Film Studio 1958, Shaoxing opera, dir. Huang Zumo 黄祖模, starring Fu Quanxiang 傅全香, Lu Jinhua 陆锦花

Prefatory presentation: Judith Zeitlin (Professor in Chinese Literature, EALC, University of Chicago)

Rivi Handler-Spitz

(Ph.D., EALC, University of Chicago)

“Judgment and the Creation of Participatory Readers in the Sixteenth Century: Li Zhi and Montaigne”

               Joseph Lam

(Professor of Musicology, University of Michigan)

“Kunqu, the Classical Opera of Globalized China“

Abstract: Kunqu, a 600 years-old genre of Chinese opera, faced threats of extinction more than once in its long history.  It has, however, not only survived, but continued to grow. In fact, kunqu now appeals to an ever-expanding community of Chinese and non-Chinese audiences. What gives the genre such a vitality? What does  its 21^st century and globalized practices signify? Kunqu, this presentation posits, is a valorized performance tradition of China, one that its audiences enjoy, and manipulate to negotiate diverse notions of Chinese identities and desires. In other words, kunqu makes not only artistic representations of China and Chinese people, but also provides expressive objects, sites, and processes for its diverse audiences to negotiate their Chinese agendas. Illustrative of such negotiations are arguments on the use of western harmonies and counterpoints in contemporary kunqu performances. If some audiences find the hybridized sounds expressions of Chinese modernity and globalization, other would lament the corruption, if not loss, of an “authentic” Chinese legacy/cultural capital. What the audiences argue obviously transcend issues of musical details; the debates are, needless to say,  thinly masked negotiations of what China was, is, and should be. Music has become a focus in the debates, because music sonically renders kunqu distinctive to its Chinese and global audiences. To discuss the above thesis, this presentation will review the valorization and manipulation of kunqu as a classical opera in globalized China. Contrasting versions of representative kunqu arias will be analyzed to demonstrate musical differences and their negotiated meanings.

 Joseph Lam is a prefessor of musicology who currently serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.  He studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (B.A.), the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (MFA), and Harvard University (Ph.D.).  Professor Lam’s research interests include: theories of ethnomusicology, theories of music historiography, ritual and music, traditional Chinese music, traditional Japanese music, and Asian American concert music. Currently, he is working on a monograph on kunqu, with the same title as the talk: “Kunqu, the Classical Opera of Globalized China.”

To download the paper, please click: guo-yingde_mudan-ting

3:30pm | Harper Memorial Hall | Room 103

 Guo Yingde 郭英德

“点铁成金：汤显祖《牡丹亭》的改写策略”

Professor Guo has been on the faculty of Beijing Normal University since 1985. He has been a visiting professor at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies and Soochow University in Taiwan, and this year is a visiting scholar at Washington University in St. Louis.  He is the author of Ming Qing chuanqi zonglu 明清传奇综录 (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1997), Ming Qing chuanqi shi 明清传奇史 (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1999), Ming Qing chuanqi xiqu wenti yanjiu 明清传奇戏曲文体研究 (Beijing: Shangwu yinshu guan, 2004), Ming Qing wenxueshi jiangyanlu 明清文学史讲演录 (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2005), Jiangou yu fansi: Zhongguo gudian wenxue yanjiu sibian lu 建构与反思：中国古典文学研究思辨录 (Xi’an: Shanxi renmin jiaoyu chubanshe, 2006), and Zhongguo gudian wenxianxue de lilun yu fangfa 中国古典文献学的理论与方法 (Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue chubanshe, 2008.)

Judith Zeitlin

(Professor in Chinese Literature, EALC, University of Chicago)

“Painting the Invisible World: Literary and Theatrical Perspectives on Luo Ping’s Ghost Amusement Scroll”

 Abstract

Luo Ping 羅聘 (1733-1799) is the youngest of the so-called Yangzhou baguai 揚州八怪– Eight Eccentric Painters of Yangzhou. His most famous work is the extraordinary Ghost Amuseument Handscroll (Guiqu tu 鬼趣圖), which accumulated more than 100 colophons, many by the most famous scholar-officials of the day. The handscroll survives in two principal versions, the earlier completed by 1771, the later by 1797. My talk will concentrate on the earlier version to make three basic points. First, that as an assemblage of disconnected but thematically linked images done on different occasions the painting transposes the ghost story collection to visual form.  Second, that Luo Ping’s innovative wet paper technique enabled him to create a visual language that captured an aesthetics of invisibility and evanescence applied to specters in the literary tradition. Third, that although scholars have mainly sought to locate the visual antecedents for his ghost images in “high” art, ritual painting and ritual opera may have been more proximate sources of inspiration and deserve further investigation. Although a central task of my talk is to investigate what made Luo Ping’s unusual images legible as ghosts to contemporary viewers, I argue that the indeterminacy of the story implied in each scene is also responsible for the imaginative speculation and interpretative invention that has characterized the outpouring of responses to the painting.

*This talk will be co-sponsored by the Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia Workshop.

     Xu Peng

      (PhD Candidate, University of Chicago)

“The ‘Misplaced’ Book: Kunqu Singing in the Late-Ming Print Culture”

Abstract:

The paper attempts to trace the emergence of the tradition of judging singing by bookish standards in late Ming China.  It argues that the universal acceptance of such standards in the singing society ultimately resulted in the transformation of Kunqu, a musical genre originating in the Suzhou area, into a learned music.  I will first look at the moment of the famous Kunqu singing style reform, allegedly led by a Wei Liangfu 魏良輔 (? – mid sixteenth century), and show how Wei’s pedagogy, best exemplified by his thesis (pref. 1547), was circulated within a literati singing-coterie.  Seeing Wei’s reform as the first wave which advocated the primacy of the text in Kunqu singing, I will then examine the second tide, which came along with the publication of Kunqu song books and the emergence of a community of professional Kunqu singing teachers.  At last, I suggest that the literati’s psychological impetus behind their advocacy of the bookish way of singing lies in their desire to transform Kunqu from a local music style into a nationwide popular form.

Screening: Shajiabang 

(1971, model opera, dir. Wu Zhaodi, Ma Erlu, Jiang Shusen, starring Tan Yuanshou, Hong Xuefei)

Guest speaker: Isabel Wong

  Isabel Wong, an ethnomusicologist specializes in the music and theater of China, is a professor emeritus of the School of Music of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before her retirement, she was also the Director of the office of Faculty and Institutional International Collaboration of the University.  In recent years, the University of Illinois has many significant collaborations with China, and Isabel Wong plays an important part.  Isabel Wong’s research and publications cover several subjects, chief among them are Kunqu, the intellectual history of modern Chinese music and musicologist, revolutionary songs for the masses of the PRC, and Shanghai popular songs between the World Wars. 

4:40pm | Cobb Hall | Room 116

Film screening: Mei Lanfang (Forever Enthralled), dir. Chen Kaige, 2008

Roundtable: Reading Mei Lanfang 

chaired by Professor Fu Jin, visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Professor of Chinese music drama at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts

 Professor Judith Zeitlin, professor in Chinese literature, University of Chicago

 Professor Paola Iovene, assistant professor in Chinese literature, University of Chicago

working language: Chinese

Light dinner will be served.

* DVD offered by Zhang Ling.