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The Enchantment of Erudition: Intellectual Labor and Literary Culture in Han-Wei China
Reihe: - Sinica Leidensia, Band: 177
Autor:in:
This book invites readers on a critical journey across the evolving aesthetics and ideology of Chinese literary culture from the first century BCE to the third century CE. Central to our inquiry is a model of becoming—from a self-oriented intellectual labor toward an individually embodied state of “erudition” and its cross-media manifestations. The emergence and proliferation of this model fostered what the book encapsulates as an “enchantment of erudition,” a phenomenal re-orientation of literary culture toward a multi-centered realization of intellectual labor and individual embodiments—an alternative to the institutional regulation of knowledge production in early imperial China.
Yixin Gu, Ph.D. (2022), Princeton University, is Assistant Professor of Chinese literature at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research on classical literature, poetics, rhetoric, and intellectual history has been published in journals like T’oung Pao, JAOS, Early China, and CLEAR.
Acknowledgments
List of Tables
Conventions
Introduction
0.1 The Living, the Dead, the Not Yet Living
0.2 Erudition as a Model of Intellectual Labor and an Emblem of Ideology
0.3 Positions in the Field
0.4 Sources and Methodologies
0.5 Outline of Chapters
Part 1 Becoming
1 The Revisionary Invention of Intellectual Model
1.1 On the Eve of a New Literary Culture
1.2 Learning as a Matter in Antiquity
1.3 Broadness as a Value of Learning
1.4 Coda
2 The Accumulated Labor toward Individual Erudition
2.1 The Prolonged Debates on the Core Values of Erudition
2.2 The Syncretic Mode of Studying Classics and Their Hermeneutic Traditions
2.3 The Extension of Self-Oriented Mastery of Knowledge and Texts
2.4 Coda
Part 2 Persisting
3 Rhetoric and Politics of Scholarly Ideology
3.1 Exemplary Figures: the Making of Collective Memory
3.2 Vulgar Scholar: the Inferior Other and His Epistemic Failure
3.3 Hypothetical Discourse: the Master Self and His Winning Voice
3.4 Coda
4 Centrifugal and Centripetal Movements of Cultural Capital
4.1 The Detachment from Official Career
4.2 The Distribution of Intellectual Resources
4.3 Neither the Beginning nor the End: Revisiting Jian’an and Beyond
4.4 Coda
Part 3 Manifesting
5 Textual Display of Erudition
5.1 What Is There beyond an Author?
5.2 Intellectual Labor and Literary Productivity
5.3 The Patterned Exteriority of Cultured Interiority
5.4 The Written Legacy as an Imagined Property
5.5 Coda
6 Cross-Media Performance of Individuality
6.1 Toward a Cross-Media Understanding of Coded System
6.2 The Significance of Paper as a New Medium of Writing
6.3 Beyond Orality-versus-Writing Dichotomy
6.4 Reciprocal Interactions between Orality, Memory, and Literacy
6.5 Coda
Conclusion
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Bibliography
Index
List of Tables
Conventions
Introduction
0.1 The Living, the Dead, the Not Yet Living
0.2 Erudition as a Model of Intellectual Labor and an Emblem of Ideology
0.3 Positions in the Field
0.4 Sources and Methodologies
0.5 Outline of Chapters
Part 1 Becoming
1 The Revisionary Invention of Intellectual Model
1.1 On the Eve of a New Literary Culture
1.2 Learning as a Matter in Antiquity
1.3 Broadness as a Value of Learning
1.4 Coda
2 The Accumulated Labor toward Individual Erudition
2.1 The Prolonged Debates on the Core Values of Erudition
2.2 The Syncretic Mode of Studying Classics and Their Hermeneutic Traditions
2.3 The Extension of Self-Oriented Mastery of Knowledge and Texts
2.4 Coda
Part 2 Persisting
3 Rhetoric and Politics of Scholarly Ideology
3.1 Exemplary Figures: the Making of Collective Memory
3.2 Vulgar Scholar: the Inferior Other and His Epistemic Failure
3.3 Hypothetical Discourse: the Master Self and His Winning Voice
3.4 Coda
4 Centrifugal and Centripetal Movements of Cultural Capital
4.1 The Detachment from Official Career
4.2 The Distribution of Intellectual Resources
4.3 Neither the Beginning nor the End: Revisiting Jian’an and Beyond
4.4 Coda
Part 3 Manifesting
5 Textual Display of Erudition
5.1 What Is There beyond an Author?
5.2 Intellectual Labor and Literary Productivity
5.3 The Patterned Exteriority of Cultured Interiority
5.4 The Written Legacy as an Imagined Property
5.5 Coda
6 Cross-Media Performance of Individuality
6.1 Toward a Cross-Media Understanding of Coded System
6.2 The Significance of Paper as a New Medium of Writing
6.3 Beyond Orality-versus-Writing Dichotomy
6.4 Reciprocal Interactions between Orality, Memory, and Literacy
6.5 Coda
Conclusion
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Bibliography
Index
Sinologists and scholars of East Asian Studies, especially those interested in premodern Chinese literature, culture, and intellectual history.