Shishuo Xinyu Research Articles

Data Model Development for the Evolution of Ancient Book Editions with Linked Open Data——Shishuo Xinyu as an Example

Data Model Development for the Evolution of Ancient Book Editions with Linked Open Data——Shishuo Xinyu as an Example

The Power of Nostalgia: Memory, Identity, and Authority in the Shishuo xinyu

Abstract The Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 (A New Account of Tales of the World) is a collection of anecdotes concerning extraordinary historical figures active in the second through fourth centuries. This article highlights and explores the importance of the Shishuo xinyu as cultural memory. In the collection, the public display and use of personal memory of the cultural past are taken as means to preserve cultural legacy, construct cultural identity, and establish cultural authority in the elite literati community. Cultural memory gained much significance after the migration of the Western Jin 西晉 (265–316) royal house and aristocratic families to the south after its fall. On one hand, shared memory and the sharing of memory of the past created an unbroken chain of cultural legacy and secured the elite literati's cultural identities in a “continuous” tradition; on the other hand, personal memory and the monopoly of memory were crucial tools to claim cultural privilege in the highly competitive community of elite literati. The peculiar nature of the anecdote as a cross between private and public matters, as well as between local and universal knowledge, lends itself perfectly to carrying out the various social functions of cultural memory. The attention to cultural memory in the Shishuo xinyu was not an accidental or isolated phenomenon. Its sentimental and personal approach to the past reflects the prevailing cultural nostalgia in writings by elite literati of the fourth and fifth centuries.

Zhonggu wenxue zhong de shi yu shi

Zhonggu wenxue zhong de shi yu shi

상고·중고 한어에 나타난 *N-계 지시사의 기원 고찰 - 트랜스-동아시아 언어 연구의 일례로

In Archaic Chinese, there existed demonstratives with an *N- initial such as 爾 *njiai, 乃 *nə, 若 *njiak, and 而 *njiə. The origin of the *N- demonstratives has long been controversial. They were frequently used as second-person pronouns in Archaic Chinese. Their occurrences as second-person pronouns predate those as demonstratives. Therefore, it is commonly assumed that the *N- demonstratives were derived from the second-person pronouns.BR This paper objects to this idea based on the directionality of grammaticalization. A second-person pronoun frequently derives from a demonstrative, but not vice versa. Demonstratives are considered as so-called “primitives of grammaticalization,” i.e., they may give rise to various kinds of grammatical markers, while they cannot be historically derived from other lexemes(Plank 1979, Diessel 1999, Kuteva et. al. 2019).BR The origin of the *N- demonstratives is as follows. They were borrowed from the neighboring Proto-Austroasiatic language(PAA). As pointed out by Norman & Mei(1976: 274), the Austroasiatics inhabited the shores of the middle Yangtze and parts of the southeast coast from 1000 B.C. to 500 B.C. and gave an influenced to Old Chinese. In PAA, the word meaning ‘this’ is reconstructed as *niɁ; *nih or *nɔɁ; *nɔh. Therefore, it is not surprising that the *N- demonstratives are borrowings from the PAA word meaning ‘this.’BR *N- demonstratives must have been broadly spread in southern China in Archaic and Medieval times. For instance, 爾 appears frequently in Six dynasty texts, such as in Shishuo xinyu 『世说新语』. It may well be because, after the Rebellion in the yǒngjiā era(永嘉之乱), the center of koine moved from the north to Nanjing, which was the capital of Eastern Jin 晋 and the following southern dynasties. 爾 is still broadly used as a near or far demonstrative in modern central and southern dialects, such as Wu, Hui, Southern Xiang, Northern Gan, and Min dialects(Zheng 2017).

Drawing Out the Essentials: Historiographic Annotation as a Textual Network

Abstract During the Liu-Song 劉宋 dynasty (420–79), Pei Songzhi 裴松之 (372–451) compiled an elaborate set of annotations to the history of the Three Kingdoms era, Sanguozhi 三國志. Several decades later, during the Liang 梁 dynasty (502–57), Liu Xiaobiao 劉孝標 (462–521) compiled similar annotations for Shishuo xinyu 世說新語, a collection of pithy anecdotes concerning prominent figures from the Han through Jin dynasties. These annotations were products of a new era of textual production, in which fervent interest in historiography and book collecting reached new heights. Though building on earlier traditions of commentary and exegesis, the influence of this newly expanded network of textual circulation can be seen in the sheer variety of sources Pei and Liu cite, as well as in their meticulous and unprecedented attention to bibliographic detail. This has made it possible to use their annotations to trace the compilers and titles of hundreds of texts that would otherwise be completely unknown. Relying on this wealth of information, earlier studies have tabulated the titles of all cited sources to create lengthy bibliographies. But in doing so, they divorce this bibliographic information from the context in which it was originally embedded. This study uses data mined from these annotations to create a series of network diagrams, which illustrate how citations of older texts create connections among the various chapters of the two texts to which they were appended. By considering the networks of textual relationships created through annotation, this study reveals the importance of otherwise marginalized texts in the construction of historiographic knowledge and sheds new light on how scholars of the early medieval period made use of, and made sense of, the increasingly vast sea of text to which they had access.

论《世说新语》在韩传播的三个问题

Focusing on the poetry and prose writings by Choi Chi-won(857-900), Lee Kyu-bo(1168-1241), and Heo Gyun(1569-1618), this paper addresses three issues in the history of the dissemination of Shi shuo xin yu (《世说新语》:A New Account of Tales of the World) in Korea during the Unified Silla dynasty(668-901), the Goryeo dynasty(918-1392), and the Joseon dynasty(1392-1897). This paper draws the conclusion that, no later than the ninth century of late the Unified Silla dynasty, via Choi Chi-won’s poems and prose writings, characters and allusions from Shi shuo xin yu were already seen in Korea and Korean literature in a great number. Re-examining and modifying the existing evidence and argumentation, this paper re-confirms the previous finding that Shi shuo xin yu was directly imported to Korea in its complete form during the Goryeo dynasty. In the Joseon dynasty, Heo Gyun, whose name was veiled in some primary materials, made a great contribution in the importation of an important edition of Sh ishuo xin yu bu (《世说新语补》:Supplement to A New Account of Tales of the World) from the Ming dynasty. In addition to an examination of the above-mentioned issues in the dissemination of Shi shuo xin yu in Korea, this paper also put forward reflections on some fundamental methodological problems such as how to describe and evaluate the classic’s cross-regional dissemination and problems to be considered when using primary materials.

한문에서 直示(deixis)의 상관관계와 발전 양상: 『世說新語』에서 대명사 연구를 중심으로

The evolution of deictic words occurs in every language. The development from spatial to person and temporal deixis is a more common trajectory than the opposite, but both progressions are apparent when the deictic words zhi and er are examined in the Shishuo xinyu. In the text, zhi is used mainly as third person or anaphoric pronoun. Historically, it was the first lexical item used to avoid naming a frequently-mentioned place or object and it gradually developed into a third person pronoun consistently referring to specified individuals. Another deictic word, er, developed in the opposite direction, from person deixis to place deixis. Since the second person er is usually an addressee, who is distant from the viewpoint of the addresser, the distal meaning was derived first and proximal usage arose later. In the text, er is used mainly as a second person, distal, or anaphoric pronoun. My investigation into zhi and er demonstrates that all the deictic functions are historically interrelated, and that later usages still reflect earlier usages to some degree.

The Three Scourges and Zhou Chu

Most scholars consider Zhou Chu's story of eliminating the three scourges—killing a flood-dragon and a man-eating tiger, as well as reforming himself—to be well-nigh impossible. In particular, the story of his moral transformation and his learning from someone over two decades his junior still remains a point at debate. It is not my intent in this study to argue for its truthfulness. What I argue is that the evidence presented by the historical and modern scholars on both sides has failed to provide satisfactory explanation. They have also failed to draw upon the information available through the writings of both Lu Ji and Lu Yun. Thus, we need not only to reinvestigate the source materials discussed by scholars, but also to closely analyze and draw upon the evidence implicitly shown in the poetic correspondence between Lu Ji and Lu Yun. In this study, I argue that there is simply not enough evidence to dismiss it as a myth, and that the literary works of Lu Ji and Lu Yun must be taken into serious consideration while examining the legend of Zhou Chu's self-reformation included in the Shishuo xinyu and his Jin shu biography.

From Spirited Youth to Loyal Official: Life Writing and Didacticism in the Jin shu Biography of Wang Dao

This paper revisits traditional notions about the relationship between the Jin shu and earlier sources for the Eastern Jin period (317–420), notably the Shishuo xinyu, through an analysis of the Jin shu biography of Wang Dao (276–339), the era's most powerful minister. Although scholars have long deemed the Jin shu a derivative work that uncritically drew upon the Shishuo xinyu and other texts of the period, I demonstrate how the authors of the Jin shu judiciously selected features from earlier sources to produce a portrait of their subject that was grounded in the terms and concerns of early Tang historiography. The careful curation of this material by Tang historians underlines the narrow criteria for selecting material to include in accounts of the period and demonstrates how biographies in the Jin shu were conceived and organized according to the emerging didactic and political functions of state-sanctioned historiography in the early Tang.

A Selective Bibliography on Shishuo xinyu

This bibliography includes Chinese, English, Japanese, French, and German scholarship on the Shishuo xinyu (A New Account of Worldly Affairs). Because a substantial amount of Chinese scholarship ha...

The Shishuo xinyu as Data Visualization

The following essay takes a macro-perspective on the Shishuo xinyu, reading it not in terms of anecdotal narrative or characterological analysis, but through questions of information management and computer-based visualization. We discuss the history of data visualization and seek to demonstrate the interpretive power (and limitations) that such computational methodologies bring to the study of premodern texts. In particular, we are concerned with the use of geographical information systems (GIS) and social network analysis, as well as with how these tools help us to visualize the complex data contained within the text. In many ways, this essay is intended as an introduction to certain aspects of the emerging field of digital humanities, one that simultaneously seeks to show how these new methodologies work within the disciplinary contexts of premodern Chinese cultural studies.

A New Note on Shishuo xinyu

Few works can match the importance of the book now known as Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 for its portrayal of cultural attitudes and social practices among elites in China from the second to fourth centuries...

Emotional Regime of the Shishuo Xinyu

Through compiling all anecdotes that reference emotional expressions from Liu Yiqing’s Shishuo xinyu, I will reveal the principles of an emotional regime (i.e. the rules and rituals of proper emotional expression). This ranking of different emotional expressions within an evaluative hierarchy is best explained in the balancing of two principles: emotional detachment and naturalness. Emotional detachment was the highest ideal, but when this was not possible, the regime required the expression of natural emotions, that is, emotions stirred by natural objects and limited to natural levels. Because the understanding of emotions is gender specific, the paper concludes with an examination of how this emotional regime applied to women.

On the Name Shishuo xinyu

I came to Berkeley in 1949 to study with Professor Peter Boodberg. For someone embarking on a study of the Six Dynasties in the late 40s and early 50s of the last century, there was not much light to help one find one’s way, and there were any number of mysterious areas that beckoned but through which one made little headway. There was, for example, the matter of xuanxue 玄學 ,t he ‘‘Dark Learning,’’ which seemed to be an intriguing subject and of central concern in post-Han times. So one turned to the Shishuo xinyu 世說新語, for it seemed that the intellectual debates of that time were recorded in those pages, and questions that were addressed at that age would be better understood by reading the text. Attempts to gain some understanding by opening the pages of the Shishuo xinyu seemed only to confuse the issue, for the meanings of the passages were often rather opaque. It seemed best to steer around the whole subject and thus avoid ending up in some unrewarding and fruitless quest. This was a period when the mortality rate among students, as it were, was rather high. There was no funding for study, and jobs were almost impossible to find. There had been a few success stories, we were told: Richard Mather, before my time, was said to have found a post; we looked at him in wonder once when he appeared in the library on a rare visit.

Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain. Volume One: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods by Kenneth Dean, Zheng Zhenman, and: Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain. Volume Two: A Survey of Village Temples and Ritual Activities by Kenneth Dean, Zheng Zhenman (review)

Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 depiction of ‘‘raw’’ ingestion of talismans must be a polemic, a Buddhist fabrication. Yet the Dengzhen yinjue passage mentioned above clearly describes direct ingestion of talismans without burning or immersion. The concluding chapters provide important evidence for the earlier appearance in Buddhist texts of certain notions concerning scriptures and their power. Much has been written recently about the value of making cultural claims based on dating texts within which specific terms appear. These approach the problem from the perspectives of philology, and of circulation and influence of those texts within communities on the ground. Here I would simply like to point out that the argument structure of these chapters is, in the end, a genealogical one, namely, that such-and-such ideas were ‘‘originally’’ Buddhist. This thus leaves room for further studies of the processes of such adaptations in China, from the perspectives of syncretism, cultural translation, and cultural and technical knowledge formation. Empowered Writing will prove an important resource for these studies, and the arguments therein will have a lasting impact on the fields of Han and Six Dynasties studies, as well as Buddho-Daoist studies. It makes an unprecedented contribution to the material history of Chinese writing—political, economic, and religious—and the easy style of its prose mixed with sophisticated argument make it excellent material for undergraduate courses in these fields. MICHAEL STANLEY-BAKER Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science KENNETH DEAN and ZHENG ZHENMAN, Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain. Volume One: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. xv, 404 pp. J103, US$152 (hb). ISBN 978-90-04-17602-7 KENNETH DEAN and ZHENG ZHENMAN, Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain. Volume Two: A Survey of Village Temples and Ritual Activities. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. xxx, 1060 pp. J185, US$263 (hb). ISBN 978-90-04-17601-0 The two-volume set by Kenneth Dean and Zheng Zhenman 鄭振滿 is published by Brill in its authoritative, beautifully presented, black-clad Handbook of Oriental Studies (HdO) series (Section 4 on China), whose remit is to publish scholarly works that are of lasting reference value.1 More than 1000 pages long, volume 2 of this set consists of systematically organized data providing a large-scale survey of deities, temples, lineages, festivals, and, most importantly, the ritual alliances on the Putian (莆田) Plain (in northern Fujian Province), which the two authors, with 1 Other volumes in the same series relating to religion in China include, for example, Handbook of Christianity in China, 635-1800 (2001, edited by Nicolas Standaert); Daoism Handbook (2000, edited by Livia Kohn); Death in Ancient China: The Tale of One Man’s Journey (2006, Constance A. Cook); Early Chinese Religion. Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC-220 AD), two volumes (2008, edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski); Early Chinese Religion, Part Two: The Period of Division (220-589), two volumes (2009, edited by John Lagerwey and Lü Pengzhi); and Local Religion in North China in the Twentieth Century: The Structure and Organization of Community Rituals and Beliefs (2009, by Daniel L. Overmyer). 106 BOOK REVIEWS the help of a team of local researchers and assistants, carried out over many years.2 Depending on the importance of the village, each village receives coverage ranging from one page to a few pages. There are altogether 724 villages comprising 153 regional ritual alliances nested within three large irrigated-plain hydro-politicalritual systems. Volume 1 of the set (still quite hefty and slimmer only relative to volume 2), entitled Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain Volume One: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods, provides a series of inter-linked chapters to help the reader make sense of what seems a morass of socio-political and ritual inventions superimposed upon one another over more than a thousand years. Because of the immensity and complexity of the data used and analyzed in this study—historical, geographical, epigraphical, archival, ethnographic, visual, statistical, cartographic, and so on—the volumes must have posed numerous organizational challenges for presentation. The separation of the survey data from the interpretations makes perfect sense, but the...

The Metaphysical Lyric of the Six Dynasties

AbstractIn the third and fourth centuries there flourished in China a literary tradition that integrated abstruse philosophizing into pentasyllabic verse: xuanyan shi or the “metaphysical lyric.” Xuanyan verse was mostly ignored in the great wave of literary critique and classification during the succeeding centuries, and much has been lost, but by using a variety of sources, ranging from the Shishuo xinyu to later imitations, we can ascertain its features and assess its later impact. Xuanyan verse played a key role in the development of early medieval poetry, providing a philosophical foundation to undergird poetic genres from which it at first appears quite alien. This article first describes the ideological and cultural context of xuanyan poetry, then surveys its major exemplars, and finally demonstrates its enduring influence.

Deciphering the reclusive landscape: a study of Wen Zheng-Ming's 1533 album of the Garden of the Unsuccessful Politician

The sixteenth century was a period of transition in both art and garden making in China. The productive landscape of agriculture characterizing the early and mid Ming gardens was gradually substitu...

The Circulation and Study of the Shishuo Xinyu in Korea

The Circulation and Study of the Shishuo Xinyu in Korea

Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties Xiaofei Tian (bio) Zong-qi Cai , editor. Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. vii, 359 pp. Hardcover $45.00, ISBN 0-8248-279.-0. Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties, edited by Zong-qi Cai, is a book of ten essays on one of the most culturally vibrant and artistically inventive periods in Chinese history. By exploring a wide range of topics such as calligraphy, music, painting, gardens, literature, and aesthetic thought, these essays shed new light on a series of larger issues that are important not only in the study of the Six Dynasties but also for our understanding of earlier as well as later periods. The Six Dynasties has often been described as a period of "literary self-consciousness," but Wai-yee Li's chapter "Shishuo xinyu and Aesthetic Self-Consciousness" endows this commonplace saying with a new dimension. Li eloquently demonstrates how an aesthetic mode of apprehending human existence emerges in the world portrayed in the .fth-century compilation Shishuo xinyu. Particularly convincing is her argument that the fascination with gesture, performance, and spectacle in the Shishuo often overrides concerns with content and meaning, or, in her words, "form is content and surface is meaning" (p. 241). The absorption in surface, however, often betrays an interest in depth; after all, surface matters in the Six Dynasties only because of the implicit belief that surface is prompted by and hence should ideally express what lies beneath. A person's speech, behavior, manners, and sometimes even physical appearance as represented in the visual arts are taken to be an articulation of the person's inner qualities, without which the outward manifestations either cannot transpire in the first place or are recognized as arti.cial. Toward the end of her essay Li explores anxieties about inauthenticity brought about by the emphasis on surface, perception, and the evaluation of human character. Such a concern is especially apt for the Shishuo xinyu, considering its typological descriptions of character traits, which may easily become nothing more than poses and gestures devoid of depth. The unease about genuineness and mere performance had wide and lasting reverberations. Robert E. Harrist, Jr.'s "Replication and Deception in Calligraphy of the Six Dynasties Period" offers a fascinating review of something that haunts every connoisseur and art historian: the replication of works of art-in this case the work of the renowned fourth-century calligrapher Wang Xizhi. Underlying the discourse on the "genuine traces" (zhenji) of a great artist is the perennial anxiety about the fake passing for the authentic, and Harrist shows that there were plenty of inauthentic Wang Xizhi pieces in circulation in the .fth and sixth centuries. The increasing concern of art connoisseurs with correctly identifying [End Page 62] fakes mirrors the phenomenon, beginning in the same period, of consciously imitating a poetic style (consider, for instance, Bao Zhao's [?-466] and Jiang Yan's [444-505] imitations of earlier writers). Indeed, wei 偽, the very character denoting "inauthentic," is directly related to wei 為, deliberate, conscious action as opposed to spontaneous action, and it is interesting to observe how conscious striving gradually becomes synonymous with faking. One of Bao Zhao's imitations is of the style of none other than Tao Qian (365?-427), the poet who has come to be regarded as embodying the very qualities of genuineness, spontaneity, and a total lack of self-consciousness. Kang-i Sun Chang's "The Unmasking of Tao Qian and the Indeterminacy of Interpretation" examines the history of the reception of Tao Qian. Moving deftly through the various myths developed around Tao Qian, Chang shows that attempts to uncover the "genuine" Tao Qian are often no more than acts of invention and self-invention on the part of Tao Qian's readers. The "genuineness" of Tao Qian is an ideological construct .rst espoused by the Northern Song literati, and the selfconscious poet who would "care very much about a reader's response" (p. 183) has often...

Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yü and Its Legacy (review)

Reviewed by: Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yü and Its Legacy Keith N. Knapp (bio) Nanxiu Qian . Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yü and Its Legacy. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001. 520 pp. Paperback $32.95, ISBN 0-8248-2397-4. Like no other text, Liu Yiqing's (403-444) Shishuo xinyu (A new account of tales of the world) reproduces the rarefied atmosphere of the late Eastern Han and Wei-Jin (150-420) salons in which sophisticated people demonstrated their worth through witty and sharp exchanges with each other. Students of early medieval China have constantly plumbed this work's rich and voluminous anecdotes for insights into the values and lives of this period's elite, yet rarely do we think about the book's overall purpose or the function of its thirty-six categories of classification. By undertaking the first book-length analysis of this seminal work's context and goals, Nanxiu Qian has done us all a great service. As if that was not enough, she also examines its literary legacy, in the form of thirty-five imitative works, which date from the Tang all the way to the twentieth century. On the basis of its vast scope and prodigious effort alone, this work is worthy of applause. Yet, it is precisely its ambition to cover so much territory that causes her argument to come up short in many places. Qian's basic contention is that the Shishuo xinyu is an objective and comprehensive study of human character that endeavors to display the unique personalities, or the "authentic selves," of the 626 figures that appear within it. Each of the thirty-six chapters represents a different behavioral trait. Thus, by placing the same character in many different chapters, the author reveals separate aspects of his or her personality. Also, by placing the characters in dramatic confrontations with each other, the author highlights their different traits, thereby indicating [End Page 242] what is unique to each. As for the text's enduring popularity, it is because literati of succeeding ages who were dissatisfied with the status quo found the Shishuo xinyu's emphasis on refinement, sophistication, freedom, and iconoclasm to be both refreshing and useful for their own self-fashioning. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, which is comprised of three chapters, examines the practice of character appraisal, which set the conditions for the creation of the Shishuo xinyu. Part 2, which contains two chapters, focuses on the categories that the text uses to characterize the protagonists in its tales and the precise methods by which it conveys their unique selves. Part 3, the longest, with five chapters, charts the text's legacy by surveying its later imitations. Chapter 1 begins by examining the history of character appraisal, a practice in which an elite evaluator would orally sum up an elite "evaluatee's inner qualities in response to the outer world" (p. 25). Qian shows how, in the Eastern Han, this practice went from a means of recommending qualified men for office based on Confucian criteria to, in the Wei-Jin period, a private practice in which members of the elite would judge each other on the degree to which they revealed their true selves. Chapter 2 portrays the Wei-Jin spirit that infuses the Shishuo xinyu. Due to the elite's growing self-awareness and the influence of xuanxue (study of the mysteries) metaphysics, people strove to be unique and to have others recognize their uniqueness. This led them to question Confucian categories and search for subtler ways to classify the multitude of personality types. This search is what motivated the writing of the Shishuo xinyu. In chapter 3, Qian argues that traditional bibliographers placed this work in the catchall category of xiaoshuo ("minor persuasions") merely because they had no other place to put it. Their difficulty stemmed from the fact that it was a work like no other; thus, Qian believes it belonged to a genre all its own, which is now known as Shishuo ti (works with the Shishuo xinyu framework). Qian hits her stride in the two chapters that...