Capturing an Early Modern Multimedia Experience: Li Yu’s Experiments at the Intersection of Print, Spatial Design, and Dramatic Performance

• In Event: Literary Migrations: Transformation in and out of Text in Qing and Early Republican China

Abstract

This paper suggests that in the early Qing the maverick literatus Li Yu used the ever more quickly reproducible and transportable medium of print to record and distribute his experiments in other media. Beginning in the Song dynasty, the technology of woodblock printing made possible the mechanical reproduction and broad distribution of printed texts, and by the late Ming books were being produced ever more quickly and more cheaply. Li Yu emphasized the ability of print to connect people in the contemporary world, using print primarily to collapse space between people of the contemporary moment – to bring him closer to his readers, to bring various cultural figures into conversation, to allow you a virtual visit to his garden – rather than valuing it for what had long been considered its primary function, transmitting the words of previous generations.

As he connected multiple contemporaneous realities through the reproducible medium of print, Li Yu worked, I argue, to render transmittable, or at least re-creatable, his innovations in other mediums, such as spatial design and dramatic performance, that can only occur in real time and space. I bring Li Yu’s short fiction, plays, edited collections, and essays (in Xianqing ouji) into conversation with one another, exploring their variations on the same experiment – how to use print to transmit the unrecordable. These premodern forms of transmediation need to be understood, I argue, through a paradigm that considers genres as media forms: as the conditions of possibility for a particular cultural expression’s emergence.

Author

• S.E. Kile, University of Michigan