Part of the Institute for Chinese Studies "Understanding China -- Its Roots and New Frontiers" Lecture Series and Literacy Studies@OSU Lecture Series
"Reading the Illustrated Texts of Late Imperial China"
A History of the Book Seminar
Recent scholarship has sought to place the great novels and short story collections of early modern China firmly within their original cultural contexts. But most scholars are concerned with how those narratives engaged current philosophical values and artistic fashions. Further examining the book as a physical object reveals meanings inherent in its materiality that might not be obvious from content alone. A combination of “distant reading” (Moretti) and close examination of the books themselves has inspired new research into popular print culture; scholars have discovered previously overlooked textual affinities between books of all kinds, joined by common methods of production and circulation. Hegel's research has proceeded one step farther, into the conventional elements of book illustrations and their role in the total reading experience. His comments will focus on the reading experience when the novel in pre-modern China reached the height of its development, during the eighteenth century.
Brian McHale (English) will respond.
Robert Hegel is Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, and Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He studies the fiction of late imperial China, especially 1500 to 1900 when the novel and short story came of age. His first book, The Novel in Seventeenth Century China, examines novels written during the transition between China’s last two dynasties; his second, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China, explores the development of reading and writing and the commercialization of print culture. His most recent project involved sifting through centuries-old legal filings in China’s imperial archives. The little-examined genre of legal case narratives is represented in True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China: Twenty Case Histories, the first collection translated into English of criminal cases - most involving homicide - from late imperial China. These true stories of crimes of passion, family conflict, neighborhood feuds, gang violence, and sedition are a treasure trove of information about social relations and legal procedure.
Brian McHale, Humantities Distinguished Professor, has taught at Tel Aviv University, West Virginia University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg (Germany), the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, among other institutions. He was for many years associate editor, and later co-editor, of the journal Poetics Today. He is co-founder of Project Narrative at Ohio State, and co-founder and past president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (A.S.A.P.). He is the author of Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Constructing Postmodernism (1992), and The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole (2004), as well as articles on free indirect discourse, mise en abyme, narrativity, modernist and postmodernist poetics, narrative poetry and science fiction. He co-edited, with Randall Stevenson, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006); with David Herman and James Phelan, Teaching Narrative Theory (2010); with Luc Herman and Inger Dalsgaard, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (2012); and with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbon, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012).
Sponsors: LiteracyStudies@OSU and Institute for Chinese Studies
