Preparing Readable Spaces: Body, Performance, and Community in Printed Books of Early Modern China

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel investigates the acts of adapting, redacting, and writing commentaries as creative processes to prepare texts for publication in sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century China. Carried out by elite readers who were also accomplished writers as part of their efforts to govern the circumstances of consumption and procedures of textual interpretation, these processes bring out the significance of reading as a dynamic practice that opened up a malleable space dominated by physicality, theater, and community-building endeavors. More than passive carriers of knowledge or vehicles of morality, printed books functioned as a field where reader-writers explored the socio-cultural potentials of working with texts.

Ling focuses on Jin Shengtan’s commentary edition of The Western Wing to promote the reader’s engagements with sensory perceptions and exterior environments to enter into and give meaning to the text. Wu discusses Jin’s appropriation of Chan Buddhist gong’an dialogues as staged performances to invigorate reading sessions by means of rhythmic variation. Gregory examines the literary circle of the renowned scholar and bibliophile Li Kaixian, tracing its impact on the reception of The Water Margin in its early printed recensions. Sibau scrutinizes the many pseudonyms of commentators of Exemplary Words for the World as ideal embodiments of the messages promoted by the text, thereby articulating reading as communal activities with multiple modalities. The four papers combine to show that, far from stabilizing the text, woodblock imprints provided a fertile ground on which literati writers, editors and publishers expanded the readability of texts as they molded them for an anticipated mass audience.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Xiaoqiao Ling, Arizona State University

Chair

• Robert E. Hegel, Washington University in St. Louis

Individual Presentations

• Jin Shengtan (1608–1661) on the Experience of Reading: Self-Discovery, Embodiment, and Joy - Xiaoqiao Ling, Arizona State University

• Staging Elegant Chan: Simulated Gong’an Dialogues in Jin Shengtan’s Commentary on Xixiang ji - Yinghui Wu, Leiden University

• Literati Bandits and For-Profit Scholars: Early Vernacular Fiction in Li Kaixian’s Circles - Scott W. Gregory, University of Arizona

• Commentary as Reading Community in the Vernacular Story Collection Xingshi yan - Maria Franca Sibau, Emory University

Discussant

• Yasushi Oki, University of Tokyo