A Report on the International Conference in Honor of Professor Tseng Yong-Yih (Zeng Yongyi), Taipei, Taiwan, 2016

Abstract

A REPORT ON THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN HONOR OF PROFESSOR TSENG YONG-YIH (ZENG YONGYI), TAIPEI, TAIWAN, 2016 WILT L. IDEMA Harvard University, USA On April 22 and 23, 2016, the Department of Chinese of National Taiwan University (NTU) organized a conference, Zeng Yongyi xiansheng xueshu chengjiu yu xinchuan guoji xueshu yantao hui 曾永義先生學術成就與薪傳國際學術研討會, in honor of the academic achievements of Professor Tseng Yong-yih (Zeng Yongyi 曾永義). Professor Tseng, who recently was elected a member of the Academia Sinica, has been an overarching presence in the study of traditional Chinese drama and popular literature for over 40 years now. He started his academic career at National Taiwan University where he obtained his M.A. in 1967 with a thesis on Changsheng dian 長生殿 (The palace of lasting life) and his Ph.D. in 1971 with a dissertation on the zaju 雜劇 of the Ming dynasty. Retained at National Taiwan University, he taught there for many decades. Upon his retirement he continued to teach at Shixin University in Taipei. He supervised over 170 M.A. and Ph.D. theses, and many of his students went on to leading positions in the field, becoming eminent scholars in their own right. Eighteen of them paid tribute to the transformative influence of their teacher in issue 371 (volume 31, issue 11, April 2016) of Guowen tiandi 國文天地 (The world of Chinese). Many foreign scholars have benefitted from his teaching and advice. Starting from the late 1970s, Professor Tseng has published prolifically—the list of his books and articles compiled on the occasion of this conference runs to over 20 pages. Apart from his academic works, Professor Tseng also published several volumes of essays on a variety of topics, and since the 1990s he also manifested himself as a productive and at times quite successful playwright, producing scripts for Kunqu 崑曲 and other theatrical genres. There is no indication that Professor Tseng plans to slow down: the conference participants not only received copies of his collected dramatic works in two volumes (Pengying wunong 蓬瀛五弄 and Pengying xunong 蓬瀛續弄), but also the first hefty volume (752 pages) of his Xiquxue 戲曲學 (Studies in Chinese indigenous theater), which is planned to run to four volumes. In the years that scholarship from the PRC was still suffused by the “vulgar Marxism” of the day, Professor Tseng’s publications were a breath of fresh air as they were always based on an intimate knowledge of the primary sources, wide reading in secondary scholarship, and original thought, whether he was dealing with matters of detail or drawing general lines of development. Throughout his CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature: 35. 2 (December 2016): 176–178© The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2016 DOI 10.1080/01937774.2016.1242831 career he not only published a continuous stream of specialized articles, but also general surveys and anthologies to meet the need of students. While his main field of interest was and is traditional drama from its earliest beginnings to the present, he also became a leading scholar in the field of traditional popular literature after he had been invited to catalog the holdings in popular literature at the Fu Ssu-nien Library of the Academia Sinica. While the detailed catalog he and his students compiled has still not been published, this work did result in the extremely useful Su wenxue gailun 俗文學概論 (Survey of popular literature) of 2003. But teaching and writing has only been one aspect of Professor Tseng’s activities. He has spent considerable time abroad as a visiting scholar at Harvard, Ann Arbor, Hong Kong, Stanford, Bochum, and Leiden. During his 1978 stay at Harvard as a Harvard-Yenching Visiting Fellow he attended a lecture in which a speaker argued that Taiwanese culture and American culture soon would be indistinguishable because of the huge American impact on local culture. This stimulated him in the 1980s to become an activist in the preservation and revitalizing of local cultural traditions. In this context he also led his students in doing fieldwork on traditional drama in Taiwan; he also became involved in the teaching of traditional Chinese drama. In the 1990s he became a leading figure in studying traditional drama in the PRC and establishing...