The Poetics of Early Chinese Thought

The Poetics of Early Chinese Thought PDF

Author: Michael Hunter

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2021-07-13

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0231553994

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The modern imagination of classical Chinese thought has long been dominated by Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, and other so-called “Masters” of the Warring States period. Michael Hunter argues that this approach neglects the far more central role of poetry, and the Shijing (Classic of Poetry) in particular, in the formation of the philosophical tradition. Through a new reading of its ideology and poetics, Hunter reestablishes the Shijing as a work of major intellectual-historical significance. The Poetics of Early Chinese Thought demonstrates how Shi poetry weaves a vision of society united at every level by the innate and universal impulse to come home. The Shi immersed early thinkers in a world of movement and flow in order to teach them that the most powerful current of all was the gravitational pull of a virtuous king, without whom people can never truly feel at home. Hunter traces the profound influence of the Shi ideology across numerous sources of classical Chinese thought, which he recasts as a network centered on the Shi. Reframing the tradition in this way reveals how poetry shaped ancient Chinese thinkers’ conception of the world and their place within it. This book offers both a sweeping critique of how classical Chinese thought is commonly understood and a powerful new way of studying it.

The Poetics of Early Chinese Thought

The Poetics of Early Chinese Thought PDF

Author: Michael Hunter

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780231201223

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The modern imagination of classical Chinese thought has long been dominated by Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, and other so-called "Masters" of the Warring States period. Michael Hunter argues that this approach neglects the far more central role of poetry, and the Shijing (Classic of Poetry) in particular, in the formation of the philosophical tradition. Through a new reading of its ideology and poetics, Hunter reestablishes the Shijing as a work of major intellectual-historical significance. The Poetics of Early Chinese Thought demonstrates how Shi poetry weaves a vision of society united at every level by the innate and universal impulse to come home. The Shi immersed early thinkers in a world of movement and flow in order to teach them that the most powerful current of all was the gravitational pull of a virtuous king, without whom people can never truly feel at home. Hunter traces the profound influence of the Shi ideology across numerous sources of classical Chinese thought, which he recasts as a network centered on the Shi. Reframing the tradition in this way reveals how poetry shaped ancient Chinese thinkers' conception of the world and their place within it. This book offers both a sweeping critique of how classical Chinese thought is commonly understood and a powerful new way of studying it.

Chinese Thought

Chinese Thought PDF

Author: Roel Sterckx

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2019-03-28

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0141984848

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Shortlisted for the PEN Hessel-Tiltman Prize 'A terrific book, rich and endlessly thought provoking. . . If you are looking for one book to understand the core ideas of Chinese civilisation, read this' - Michael Wood An engrossing history of ancient Chinese philosophy and culture from an eminent Cambridge expert We are often told that the twenty-first century is bound to become China's century. Never before has Chinese culture been so physically, digitally, economically or aesthetically present in everyday Western life. But how much do we really know about its origins and key beliefs? How did the ancient Chinese think about the world? In this enlightening book, Roel Sterckx, one of the foremost experts in Chinese thought, takes us through centuries of Chinese history, from Confucius to Daoism to the Legalists. The great questions that have occupied China's brightest minds were not about who and what we are, but rather how we should live our lives, how we should organise society and how we can secure the well-being of those who live with us and for whom we carry responsibility. With evocative examples from philosophy, literature and everyday life, Sterckx shows us how the ancient Chinese have shaped the thinking of a civilization that is now influencing our own.

The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry

The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry PDF

Author: Stephen Owen

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13:

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This study of poetry composed between the end of the first century B.C.E. and the third century C.E. examines extant material synchronically, as if it were not historically arranged. It also considers how scholars of the late fifth and early sixth centuries selected this material and reshaped it to produce the standard account of classical poetry.

Poetics of Emptiness

Poetics of Emptiness PDF

Author: Jonathan Stalling

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2011-10-03

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0823231461

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The Poetics of Emptiness uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two sections. The first focuses on "transpacific Buddhist poetics," while the second maps the less well-known terrain of "transpacific Daoist poetics." In Chapters 1 and 2, the author explores Ernest Fenollosa's "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry" as an expression of Fenollosa's distinctly Buddhist poetics informed by a two-decade-long encounter with a culturally hybrid form of Buddhism known as Shin Bukkyo ("New Buddhism"). Chapter 2 explores the classical Chinese poetics that undergirds the lost half of Fenellosa's essay. Chapter 3 concludes the first half of the book with an exploration of the didactic and soteriological function of "emptiness" in Gary Snyder's influential poetry and poetics. The second half begins with a critical exploration of the three-decades-long career of the poet/translator/critic Wai-lim Yip, whose "transpacific Daoist poetics" has been an important fixture in American poetic late modernism and has begun to gain wider notoriety in China. The last chapter engages the intertextual weave of poststructural thought and Daoist and shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's important body of heterocultural productions. By formulating interpretive frames as hybrid as the texts being read, this book makes available one of the most important yet still largely unknown stories of American poetry and poetics.

Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry

Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry PDF

Author: Wendy Swartz

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-10-26

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1684170958

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"In a formative period of Chinese culture, early medieval writers made extensive use of a diverse set of resources, in which such major philosophical classics as Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Classic of Changes featured prominently. Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry examines how these writers understood and manipulated a shared intellectual lexicon to produce meaning. Focusing on works by some of the most important and innovative poets of the period, this book explores intertextuality—the transference, adaptation, or rewriting of signs—as a mode of reading and a condition of writing. It illuminates how a text can be seen in its full range of signifying potential within the early medieval constellation of textual connections and cultural signs.If culture is that which connects its members past, present, and future, then the past becomes an inherited and continually replenished repository of cultural patterns and signs with which the literati maintains an organic and constantly negotiated relationship of give and take. Wendy Swartz explores how early medieval writers in China developed a distinctive mosaic of ways to participate in their cultural heritage by weaving textual strands from a shared and expanding store of literary resources into new patterns and configurations."

The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy

The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy PDF

Author: Curie Virág

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0190498811

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This book traces the genealogy of early Chinese conceptions of emotions, as part of a broader inquiry into evolving conceptions of self, cosmos and the political order. It seeks to explain what was at stake in early philosophical debates over emotions and why the mainstream conception of emotions became authoritative.

Knowledge in Early Chinese Thought

Knowledge in Early Chinese Thought PDF

Author: Donald James Sturgeon

Publisher: Open Dissertation Press

Published: 2017-01-26

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781361342138

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This dissertation, "Knowledge in Early Chinese Thought" by Donald James, Sturgeon, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Early Chinese philosophical texts contain discussions of the nature, origins, and possibility of knowledge, in which both positive accounts and skeptical responses to them are couched in importantly different terms to those most familiar from similar discussions in Western philosophy. In place of appeals to truth, belief, and fallibility of the senses, action, discrimination, and difference of perspective play crucial roles. The aim of this dissertation is to explain why this should be so, and what consequences this had for the early Chinese understanding of knowledge. In an attempt to answer these questions, I argue that, likely influenced by both facts about the classical Chinese language and key philosophical trends and interests of the time, discussions of knowledge by early Chinese thinkers generally referenced a broad notion of knowledge that was seen as being closely related to action. Linguistic factors also contributed to theorizing about knowledge focusing not on beliefs or other sentential structures, but rather on the drawing of action-guiding shi-fei distinctions, and the same shi-fei framework that was applied to perception was also applied to knowledge. Language, understood most fundamentally in terms of an ability to distinguish shi-fei and apply names to things in the correct way, also played an important role in the pre‐Qin understanding of knowledge. On a linguistic level, knowledge corresponded to reliably correct language use, and rigid fa (法 standards, models) were seen as underwriting this by providing the standard of correctness. Just as these fa could be used to measure the correctness of individual terms, thinkers interested in the correctness of doctrines and speech in general attempted to apply the same idea to larger linguistic structures such as sentences, in the hope of finding fa for correct language use at a higher level. In doing so, they discovered facts about natural language use that could not be accounted for using the types of fa they considered. Likely in part influenced by similar observations, others called into question the existence and uniqueness of standards in general and the adequacy of language in expressing knowledge. I argue that the prevailing positive view of knowledge ultimately gave rise to an interesting and nuanced form of skepticism grounded in a form of perspectivism. This skepticism does not merely have the negative consequence that we should question some of our knowledge commitments, but can also be used to suggest that - while still doubting - we can make practical use of our skepticism to improve our knowledge by considering a wider range of perspectives. DOI: 10.5353/th_b5204917 Subjects: Philosophy, Chinese

The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition

The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition PDF

Author: Zehou Li

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2009-11-12

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0824833074

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Li Zehou (b. 1930) has been an influential thinker in China since the 1950s. Before moving to the U.S. in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Li published works on Kant and traditional and contemporary Chinese philosophy. The present volume, a translation of his Huaxia meixue (1989), is considered among Li’s most significant works. Apart from its value as an introduction to the philosophy of one of contemporary China’s foremost intellectuals, The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition fills an important gap in the literature of Chinese aesthetics in English. It presents Li’s synthesis of the entire trajectory of Chinese aesthetic thought, from ancient times to the early modern period, incorporating pre-Confucian and Confucian ideas, Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and the influence of Western philosophy during the late-imperial period. As one of China’s As one of China's major contemporary philosophers and preeminent authority on Kant, Li is uniquely positioned to observe this trajectory and make it intelligible to today’s readers. The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition touches on all areas of artistic activity, including poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, and the "art of living." Right government, the ideal human being, and the path to spiritual transcendence all come under the provenance of aesthetic thought. According to Li this was the case from early Confucian explanations of poetry as that which gives expression to intent, through Zhuangzi’s artistic depictions of the ideal personality who discerns the natural way of things and lives according to it, to Chan Buddhist-inspired notions that nature and words can come together to yield insight and enlightenment. In this enduring and stimulating work, Li demonstrates conclusively the fundamental role of aesthetics in the development of the cultural and psychological structures in Chinese culture that define "humanity."

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