The Institute for Chinese Studies presents:
Ksenia Chizhova
Princeton University
William Hedberg
Arizona State University
Flyer: Forthcoming
Ksenia Chizhova's talk will approach the emergence of the Korean lineage novel (kamun sosŏl)--a lengthy genre of vernacular fiction that was coeval with the emergence of Korean patrilineage in the late 17th century--from a historical and a comparative angle. Lineage novels depict Korean kinship as a series of conflicts between genders and generations, tracing the private lives of protagonists, who need to overcome their unruly feelings to assume prescribed kinship roles. This talk will offer a brief sketch of the literary influence from late imperial Chinese philosophy and literature that are discernible in the keen interest in unruly emotions that lineage novels display. And it will also map intellectual intersections between the study of fiction, emotions, and family in early modern Korea and China.
William Hedberg's presentation examines early modern Japanese interest in Chinese literature, language, and material culture, through the lens of the late imperial novel, The Water Margin: the account of 108 outlaws in 12th-century China, and their successful insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. The Water Margin was imported into Japan in the early 17th century, where it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. After briefly presenting the Japanese reception of The Water Margin in a variety of early modern contexts--from 18th-century Confucian scholarship to early 20th-century colonial ethnography--I turn attention to the ways in which The Water Margin and other works of Chinese fiction impacted the Japanese imagination of China: a process that, in turn, had a profound effect on Edo- and Meiji-period revolutions in reading practices, narratology, and literary scholarship.
Kseia Chizhova is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Princeton University. Her work focuses on the history of emotions, family, and scriptural practices in Korea, from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century. Professor Chizhova's first manuscript, Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday(link is external), looks into the rise and fall of the lineage novel (kamun sosŏl), which narrated the interstices of Korea’s kinship system and foregrounded the genealogical subject—a structure of identity defined by kinship obligation and understood as socialization of the emotional self. Lineage novels, which constituted the core of elite vernacular Korean literature and circulated between the late 17th and early 20th centuries, configure Korean kinship as a series of clashes between genders and generations, which produce unruly, violent emotions.
William C. Hedberg is an assistant professor of Japanese literature at Arizona State University, focusing on the literature and culture of early modern Japan (18th-20th c.). His interests include the Japanese reception of late imperial Chinese fiction and drama, translation studies, and travel literature. Hedberg's first monograph, The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon, was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. His second project centers on Edo-period travel literature, cartography, and representations of the foreign.
Free and Open to the Public
If you require an accommodation, such as live captioning, to participate in this event, please contact Stephanie Metzger at metzger.235@osu.edu or 614-247-4725. Requests made at least two weeks in advance of the event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
This event is supported by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.
