J011: Performative Texts: Early and Early Medieval Chinese Perspectives on Intertextuality

Organizer(s)

• 

  Tobias Zuern

  Washington University in St. Louis, United States

Chair(s)

• WS

  Wendy Swartz

  Rutgers University-New Brunswick, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• HS

  Hsiang-Lin Shih

  St. Olaf College, United States
• TW

  Tsung Kei Wong

  Princeton University, United States
• 

  Tobias Zuern

  Washington University in St. Louis, United States
• NW

  Nicholas Williams

  University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Discussant(s)

• WS

  Wendy Swartz

  Rutgers University-New Brunswick, United States

Session Abstract: Nowadays, the term “intertextuality” is mainly used as an umbrella term for any text-text relationship in philological research. While most scholars perpetuate such a logocentric perspective of the theory that Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes developed in the late 1960s, they ignore the fact that neither Kristeva nor Barthes solely focused on written or printed texts. They also had other cultural aspects in mind, for every text inevitably emerges within a system of cultural practices.

This chronologically organized panel follows their transdisciplinary perspectives and proposes that we may understand intertextuality as an interaction of “cultural textures.” Shih Hsiang-Lin, for example, proposes that agricultural references in the Shi jing work as hyperlinks that the Zhou li activated to evoke and propagate a Zhou identity. Tsung Kei Wong argues that intertextuality functions as a pedagogical device in the Huainanzi, allowing the reader to experience the process of accumulative learning (jixue) as laid out in the Xunzi. Tobias Zürn reads the Huainanzi’s intertextuality as a literary strategy to weave together an efficacious, wuwei-performing scripture. And Nick Williams explores how intertextuality serves as a tool in Lu Ji’s “Wen fu” to build a spiritual journey that connects the author/reader with the Way.

By accentuating intertextuality’s underlying association with cultural practices like identity construction, experiential learning, weaving, non-action, and roaming in early and early medieval China, these papers provide some premodern Chinese voices with the power to illuminate, unsettle, or even provincialize our current theoretical discourse that mainly attributes rather static properties to “text-text” relationships.

Presentations:

• Across the Gateless Barriers: Hyperlinked Farming Poetry in the Shi jing
  

  Paper Presenter: Hsiang-Lin Shih – St. Olaf College
• Reading Huainanzi, Becoming Xunzi: Reading, Intertextuality, and Praxis in Early China
  

  Paper Presenter: Tsung Kei Wong – Princeton University
• Writing as Weaving: Intertextuality and the Huainanzi’s Self-Fashioning as a Powerful Embodiment of the Way
  

  Paper Presenter: Tobias B. Zuern – Washington University in St. Louis
• Chinese Intertextuality in Light of Lu Ji’s “Wen fu”
  

  Paper Presenter: Nicholas Williams – University of Hong Kong