New Manuscript Evidence on the Formation of the Analects: The Warring States Anhui University *Zhongni Said and the Wangjiazui *Kongzi Said

At the beginning of the 20th century an immense library of medieval manuscripts was discovered in the caves of Dunhuang in northwest China. Among these manuscripts there is a relatively small body of vernacular texts that shed new light on the opaque history of literature written by the Chinese non-elite. This article presents an emended edition and a German translation of the five remaining manuscripts of “Han Peng fu”, arguably one of the most moving and heart-warming vernacular texts recovered at Dunhuang. Set in the period of the Warring States, “Han Peng fu” tells the romantic and tragic story of the young Zhenfu and her husband Han Peng, whose fate is to unite only in death to which they are driven by the malicious schemes of the King of Song and his cunning advisor Liang Bo. Comparing “Han Peng fu” with other existing versions of the legend of Han Peng found on Bamboo strips from the late Western Han Dynasty and included in some later works such as Lieyi zhuan, Yuejue shu and Soushen ji, this article further studies the tradition of this narrative and identifies possible connections to other famous lores such as Meng Jiang nu, Kongque dongnan fei, Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai, and the legend of Xishi.

The paper raises the issue of inadequacy of the current narratological vocabulary when it comes to the question of who is speaking in traditional (oral and orally derived) narratives. Drawing on the concepts of "emergence" and "distributed representation" from the sciences of complexity, I attempt to provide an account of traditional narratives as self-organizing adaptive systems, the stories that "tell themselves." Rather than being products of a single mind, traditional narratives evolve over extensive periods of time and arise from networks of interrelated individuals: epic singers, storytellers/writers/scribes, audience members. Each of these individuals (network nodes) makes a local (if creative, or even unique) contribution, but none in particular is responsible for the character/identity of the whole text. This creativity relates irreducibly to the levels of organization beyond the individual, and is to be credited to the evolutionary dynamics of the narrative production itself, here termed the distributed author. The paper focuses on the sagas of Icelanders and Serbian epic poetry as they, due to the strong prevalence of decentralizing social factors in the milieus in which they evolved, represent exemplary products of distributed authorship.

Classical Rabbinic Literature and the Making of Jewish Ethics

In 2015, Anhui University acquired a valuable batch of bamboo manuscripts from the Warring States period. The Anda slips have received wide attention both abroad and in China, in particular the Shi jing manuscript contained therein. This article discusses the sequence, number, and variants of the songs, titles, wording, and phrasing in the Shi jing manuscript. The final section of this article introduces the philological value of this find.

This research aims to explore deconstructive reading on traditional narratives in coursebook and how the EFL pre-service teachers’ insights on it. This research imposes its theoretical framework in the concepts of Deconstruction, EFL Pre-service Teachers, Literature, Traditional Narrative Text, and Coursebook. The type of this research is qualitative, the approach is case study. The data in this research are text fragmentations from the narrative texts and the statements of the EFL students. The first source of the data is the narrative texts in the coursebook. The second source of the data is interview with some EFL pre-service teachers from various university in Surabaya. The techniques of data collection in this research are documentation and non-structured interview. The technique of data analysis in this research is thematic analysis. The result of the analysis is narrative texts provided by Kemendikbud in English coursebook seem to be conventional and it requires EFL teachers with good sense of literature to help out students to make the meaning relevant with the life they live today. Some interviewed EFL pre-service teachers put some insights that meaning in the traditional narrative texts in the English coursebook. For them, traditional narrative is important, but the interpretative meaning should be deconstructed in more various meaning, not in one-sided claim which one is true and false.

The historical literatures about “Shanghai Museum Bamboo Manuscripts” were diverse and highly valuable. The manuscripts were the productions of mid and late Warring States Period. Although they were secondary sources, as compared with other historical records, there were less subjective additions and deletions or slips of the pen from later scholars, and their academic value was undoubtedly higher. While conducting historical research, the closer the era of historical events, it is always also the more possible to preserve its true face. Although these bamboo manuscripts were the works of the Warring States Period, they were mutual referred and proved by later literatures, their lacks were also supplemented. All of these activities demonstrated the academic value of these bamboo manuscripts, and their historical literatures were worth for further study. In these bamboo manuscripts, the contents related to King Zhuang, Ling and Ping of the Chu were “zhuang wang ji cheng”, “jeng tz jia sang”, “shen gong chen ling wang”, “ping wang wen zheng shou”, and “ping wang yu wang zi mu”. These five brief writings were included in the sixth and seventh volume of “Shanghai Museum Bamboo Manuscripts”. They were novel and complete, and many incomprehensible characters or explanatory notes required to be explored. These brief writings would be important historical reference and proof materials, however, historians could get useful information from them only after the characters or explanatory notes could be unraveled and the manuscripts become readable to them. Therefore, the thesis focuses on the textual explication and explanatory notes of the bamboo manuscripts, and involves in historical proofs. Some difficult characters that involve lots of reference materials are systematically discussed in individual sections. The above-mentioned brief writings were the first-hand materials of Chu written by Chu men. Among them, only the corresponding words of “ping wang yu wang zi mu” were found in “Bianwu, Shuouan” and “Fuyang Bamboo Slips”, the rest chapters of these writings were lost after Han Period. The author takes these five writings as object of study, tries to determine the writing, to researches historical facts, and expects to make the writings plain and to manifest their values.

Unprovenanced manuscripts increasingly inform the study of early China. Scholars of early China must therefore take a stance as to how they want to position themselves towards such resources. After the publication of the unprovenanced manuscripts in the possession of the Shànghǎi Museum, some members of the scholarly community decided to disengage with research involving unprovenanced texts. They no longer comment, in print, on any matter related to such manuscripts. Or so they claim. Others, including myself, deem it necessary, indeed important, and academically warranted, to engage in considerable depth with these materials, as well as with the academic output created by their publication. And of course, there are various shades of grey between those two camps. Now that with the Ānhuī Dàxué 安徽大學 (Anhui University) acquisition of Songs (Shī 詩) and a text in the tradition of the Analects of Confucius (*Zhòngní yuē 仲尼曰 ‘Confucius said’) the field is confronted with another major cache of foundational texts of unknown origins dating to the Warring States period (c. 453–221 BC), it is timely that we reflect, methodologically, on the pros and cons of using these materials in academic discourse.

The Airs manuscript held by Anhui University (hereafter Anda Airs ) indicates that by the late Warring States, the Odes was approaching fixity; none of its odes are absent from the transmitted Mao Odes , and although there is evidence for significant variance at many levels, its stanzas were relatively stable units. This paper explores how reorganizing those units might affect narrative in the Airs , by comparative reading of the transmitted Qin Airs ode “No clothing” (Wu yi 無衣 ; no. 133) against a fragment preserved in the Anda Airs manuscript. I argue that the inverted stanzaic sequence and added lines of the Anda version constrain the narrative such that the ode’s interpretation must have differed significantly from the transmitted version. Moreover, the example presents a model for reconsidering the ontology of seemingly dubious “ironic” interpretations of individual odes.

In September, 2019, Anhui University published the first volume of Warring States bamboo-slip manuscripts in its collection. The bamboo slips were purchased by the university in 2015 on the antique market. This volume contains ninety-three slips that correspond with all of or portions of fifty-seven poems in the Guo feng 國風 (Airs of the States) section of the Shi jing 詩經 (Classic of Poetry). The manuscript is written in the script of the ancient state of Chu 楚, and thus presumably was robbed from a tomb somewhere in the territory of that state. This preliminary study of the manuscript presents close readings of six representative poems, comparing the versions in the manuscript with those of the received text. It concludes with consideration of how to understand the textual variants apparent in the manuscript, and also the significance of the manuscript for the composition and especially the transmission of the Shi jing in the pre-Qin period.

This article discusses three topics. First, it discusses the line “I could not fill my slanting basket” 不盈頃筐 in the poem “Juan er” 卷耳. The Anhui University Bamboo Slip version’s qing 頃 (slanting) is written . This, as with the Chu Silk Manuscript character, should be explained as qi 攲 (lopsided). Second, regarding the line “Do you not understand me?” 不諒人只 in the poem “Bai zhou” 柏舟 of the Yong Airs 鄘風 section, the Anhui University Bamboo Slip version of liang 諒 (understanding) is written jing 京. This character should be understood as qiang 強 in the sense of “coerce/force” 強迫. In the line “Supporting King Wu” 涼彼武王 in the poem “Da ming” 大明 of the Major Elegantiae 大雅, liang 涼 is similarly explained as 強 in the sense of “coerce” 威強. These two characters have always been traditionally glossed as either “trust” 信 or “assist” 佐. Third, regarding the line “… it cannot be recited” 不可讀也 of the poem “Qiang you ci” 牆有茨, du 讀 (reciting) in the Han Poetry 韓詩 is glossed in the sense of “record and narrate” 記述, which is superior to the traditional gloss.

This research establishes the key typological characteristics of the modern Serbian 20th century novel, exemplified by the works of three major representatives of the Yugoslav/Serbian literary canon, who span the periods of Yugoslav/Serbian Modernism and Postmodernism: Ivo Andric, Milos Crnjanski and Borislav Pekic. The typology, based on a multiplicity of features, which include narrative structure, genre, historical context – literary, philosophical and socio-political – maps the poetics of the Serbian postmodern novel as an evolution from and apotheosis of the literary innovations of Serbian Modernist poetics. This process of evolution is traced on the basis of the works of Andric, Crnjanski and Pekic, who span a creative period between the first decade of the 19th century and late 1980s in Serbian literary production. Although much work has been done on the theoretical and historical definition of Yugoslav/Serbian Postmodernism, there is still no systematic study of the typology of narrative features which focus on the historical function of the relationship between, on the one hand, the Narrative Subject and the Narrator Figure and, on the other hand, the narrative structure of the Serbian postmodern novel. In other words, there is yet no Structuralist study of the poetics of Serbian Postmodernism. This is the gap which the present thesis aims to fill. The Structuralist analysis of representative works of Andric, Crnjanski and Pekic, which is the core of this typology, is focused on the narrative structure of their novels and related innovative genres. The evolution of the Serbian postmodern novel is traced by means of this structural analysis as a process of the disintegration of the Narrative Subject and the re-construction of the Narrator Figure. The Narrator Figure as a term used in this thesis does not imply any figurality in the construction of the narrator. The term “figure” is used as an abstract term, not intended to evoke connotations of “someone” in or “trousers” or that is with characterological features, even if the function of this Narrator Figure may imply a “person” such as an “editor”. The Narrative Subject is considered a feature of the Modernist texts, while the Narrator Figure is a substitution for the Narrative Subject in postmodern texts. This is the evolution in the narrative structure of the Serbian novel from Modernism to Postmodernism. The gradual transformation of the Narrative Subject, which appears to carry the burden of the structure in Andric, and Crnjanski’s (early 20th century) Modernist works, into a Narrator Figure in Andric’s and Crnjanski’s and Pekic’s postmodern works, has been traced by means of a close to the text analysis of the structure of the novels of these three writers at various stages of their poetic production. The Narrator Figure in the mature Serbian postmodern novel, exemplified by Pekic, functions as an Editor and Interpreter of Found Manuscripts or documents, thus relinquishing any claim to being an oracular figure like the traditional omniscient narrator. Moreover, his function can be taken over by any other character who is part of his narrated story. This disseminated or fragmented Narrator Figure determines the open novel structure of the postmodern Serbian novel, whose main innovative feature is the Embedded Text and intertextuality as key components of the new postmodern poetics. The overall aim of the thesis is to acquire a critical insight into the typological features of Serbian 20th century prose in the context of European and world Postmodernism, with special emphasis on the postmodern poetics and postmodern condition of Yugoslav/Serbian literature.

The years had passed like a shadow, unnoted, uncounted, and had brought him to this point of pause, of change momentous, when he must needs look before and after.1 There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason, the argument which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely, the appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope.2 Change has always been the presiding author of our lives. Whether incremental or swift, unexpected or foreseen, change demarcates our perception of time and time's ongoing narrative expression. As the narrative theorists have long told us, we live according to the narratives that give our lives sense and form, in response to the complex interplay of peripeteia and anagnorisis. Changing circumstances—especially sudden, unexpected changes—stress or rupture our expectations of reality; we respond to the force of emergent occasions, like Donne, by suturing over those breaks, using allegory, myth, metaphor, narratives of tradition and renewal, devotions and prayers of all types, in order to accommodate the “[v]ariable, and therefore miserable condition of Man.”3 It is at those moments of pause and change that human individuality is perhaps felt most keenly; the reverberations of the emergent occasion play about the border between individual lives and their enveloping contexts. Beowulf is the earliest text in the English tradition that takes the emergent occasion and its effect on human lives as one of its central concerns. Through its representation of unprecedented change, Beowulf deliberates upon the most complex of issues: the formation of human character in the exigency of the changing historical moment. Our poet sets his characters and his audience in a world of secure knowledge and expectations, and then he tracks the complex emotions produced when unexpected change nevertheless falls into inevitable place.4

What is a game? What are we doing when we play a game? What is the value of playing games? Several different philosophical subdisciplines have attempted to answer these questions using very distinctive frameworks. Some have approached games as something like a text, deploying theoretical frameworks from the study of narrative, fiction, and rhetoric to interrogate games for their representational content. Others have approached games as artworks and asked questions about the authorship of games, about the ontology of the work and its performance. Yet others, from the philosophy of sport, have focused on normative issues of fairness, rule application, and competition. The primary purpose of this article is to provide an overview of several different philosophical approaches to games and, hopefully, demonstrate the relevance and value of the different approaches to each other. Early academic attempts to cope with games tried to treat games as a subtype of narrative and to interpret games exactly as one might interpret a static, linear narrative. A faction of game studies, self‐described as “ludologists,” argued that games were a substantially novel form and could not be treated with traditional tools for narrative analysis. In traditional narrative, an audience is told and interprets the story, where in a game, the player enacts and creates the story. Since that early debate, theorists have attempted to offer more nuanced accounts of how games might achieve similar ends to more traditional texts. For example, games might be seen as a novel type of fiction, which uses interactive techniques to achieve immersion in a fictional world. Alternately, games might be seen as a new way to represent causal systems, and so a new way to criticize social and political entities. Work from contemporary analytic philosophy of art has, on the other hand, asked questions whether games could be artworks and, if so, what kind. Much of this debate has concerned the precise nature of the artwork, and the relationship between the artist and the audience. Some have claimed that the audience is a cocreator of the artwork, and so games are a uniquely unfinished and cooperative art form. Others have claimed that, instead, the audience does not help create the artwork; rather, interacting with the artwork is how an audience member appreciates the artist's finished production. Other streams of work have focused less on the game as a text or work, and more on game play as a kind of activity. One common view is that game play occurs in a “magic circle.” Inside the magic circle, players take on new roles, follow different rules, and actions have different meanings. Actions inside the magic circle do not have their usual consequences for the rest of life. Enemies of the magic circle view have claimed that the view ignores the deep integration of game life from ordinary life and point to gambling, gold farming, and the status effects of sports. Philosophers of sport, on the other hand, have approached games with an entirely different framework. This has lead into investigations about the normative nature of games—what guides the applications of rules and how those rules might be applied, interpreted, or even changed. Furthermore, they have investigated games as social practices and as forms of life.

The Guodian Chu Slips were unearthed in 1993 in tomb no.1 of the Guodian Chu tombs in Jingmen, Hubei province. The archeological team suggested the tomb should be dated to the latter half of the Warring States period (mid-fourth to early third century B.C.). The slips should be dated earlier than the tomb itself. There are in total over 800 bamboo slips in this cache, including some 730 inscribed slips. After restoration these were divided into the following sixteen texts: ”Laozi”, ”Taiyi shengshui”, ”Zhiyi”, ”Duke Mu of Lu queries Zisi”, ”Qiongda yishi”, ”Wuxing”, ”Tangyu zhidao”, ”Zhongxin zhidao”, ”Chengzhi wenzhi”, ”Zundeyi”, ”Xingzimingchu”, ”Liude” and ”Yucong (4 pieces).” These pre-Qin manuscripts are both Daoist and Confucian in character. Composed of forty- nine slips, the ”Liude” text deals with Confucian principles of human relationships. The texts mention three groups of interrelated concepts: ”six virtues”, ”six positions” and ”six vocations.” The six virtues are: duty, loyalty, knowledge, faithfulness, wisdom and humaneness; the six positions are: ruler, minister, husband, wife, father and son; the six vocations are: order, service, leadership, subservience, instruction and learning. Once the six types of human relationships are harmonized then society and state may be stabilized. The basis for all relationships is filial piety and proper respect among brothers. The ”Liude” text is not extant among the traditional transmitted texts and must be considered a lost Confucian text of the Warring States period. This article uses the transcriptions published in Chu Bamboo Slips from Guodian (published in May, 1998 by Wenwu) as a basis along with research on the slips published since that time. The article is divided into two: general summary, where Ⅰ explain the meaning of the text as a whole, as well as discuss the development of its thought, followed by annotation and interpretation. In this main part of the article Ⅰ explicate the characters and phrases of the slips, using traditional transmitted texts as evidence. Ⅰ also provide some new interpretations for the links among the slips.

A motif in the Cypria is sometimes explained as borrowed in the seventh century from the Akkadian epic Atra-ḫasīs , sometimes as inherited from a third-millennium Indo-European poetic tradition surviving also in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata . These explanations seem incompatible, but they are not. Narrative traditions often cross linguistic boundaries through multilinguals, and linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that some speakers of Proto-Indo-European were also speakers of Semitic languages. Indo-European and Ancient Near Eastern comparative approaches are therefore halves of a single enterprise: the Cypria , Mahābhārata and Atra-ḫasīs belong to a Eurasian-Steppe tradition, and must be read together.