Chen Liu

When the people of the future look at our Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and text messages, will they consider them part of the literature of our age? This is the question that Chen Liu, PhD candidate in East Asian languages and civilizations, asks of a corpus of 12th-century Chinese texts she studies.

Chen has coined the term “jottings” to refer to a large quantity of miscellaneous prose that are as informal as they are varied. “Jottings” encompasses anything from memos accompanying gifts of teacake to short accounts of a person’s dreams. Although their variety makes them hard to classify as literature at first glance, Chen argues that jottings are nevertheless an integral part of the literature of 12th-century China and tell us a lot about the era in which they originated.

As woodblock printing became widespread during the Song dynasty, some two centuries prior to the European printing revolution, informal jottings rose to popularity and were even circulated in bound compendiums throughout China. Jottings would crystallize as bona fide genres after the loss of Northern China to an invading regime. It is the personal, loose nature of these writings, Chen posits, that made them the best vehicle for literati of the South to express their nostalgia for their lost homeland.

According to Chen, just as the voices on contemporary social media are shaped by and shape, in turn, the cultural currents of our time, so did the jottings of the Song dynasty. As Chen says, “The jotting culture of 12th-century China shows that literature has no boundaries.”