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This seminar investigates literary strategies for depicting and animating things in premodern China. We will trace the development of the principal genres for talking about objects, from yongwu poetry and riddle tales, to inscriptions, colophons, and manuals of taste. How, we will ask, have authors probed and reimagined human attachments to things. How have practices of collecting and connoisseurship transformed Chinese literary culture? How have objects been used to think about what it means to be human in the Chinese literary tradition. Our discussions will engage recent scholarship on materiality from the fields of literary theory and the history of material culture. The course will include viewing sessions in the Harvard Art Museums and Harvard-Yenching Library. |
