The Genius of Form: Jin Shengtan's (1608–1661) Transformative Literary Program (2024)

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Jin Shengtan (1608-1661) and Writing as a Technology of Transformation

Alia B Goehr

Throughout his commentaries on poetry, drama, fiction, and classical prose, the literary critic Jin Shengtan (1608-1661) persistently describes his base texts in terms of lively figurations of brush and ink, blurring the line between text and inscription. The cumulative effect of such descriptions is an emphasis on style, which reframes the seemingly static text as a medium both inscribed and scriptive, capable of transmitting its author’s techniques to the reader.The explicit Buddhist investments of many of Jin Shengtan’s commentaries, however, indicate that he intended to effect transformations that were not merely technical. In his annotated anthology of examination essays, he declares, “Presently, our land is actually employing brush and ink in order to do the work of transforming all living beings [literally “Buddha’s work” foshi 佛事]. Its ink-dipping and brush-wielding are but the genuine cultivation of actual enlightenment—it is wrong to say that these are nothing but the trifling skills of shallow scholars!” This paper examines how Jin Shengtan configures writing as a technology of transformation at once pragmatic and spiritual, technical and moral. Setting aside the genre-based frameworks according to which his work has traditionally been understood, I reveal how his deliberate attention to brush and ink as inscriptive media aimed to present style not as a transcendent component of literary aesthetics, but as an attainable technique of the body, transmittable through brush and ink.

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Jin Shengtan (1608-1661) and Writing as a Technology of Transformation (SLIDES)

Alia B Goehr

Throughout his commentaries on poetry, drama, fiction, and classical prose, the literary critic Jin Shengtan (1608-1661) persistently describes his base texts in terms of lively figurations of brush and ink, blurring the line between text and inscription. The cumulative effect of such descriptions is an emphasis on style, which reframes the seemingly static text as a medium both inscribed and scriptive, capable of transmitting its author’s techniques to the reader. The explicit Buddhist investments of many of Jin Shengtan’s commentaries, however, indicate that he intended to effect transformations that were not merely technical. In his annotated anthology of examination essays, he declares, “Presently, our land is actually employing brush and ink in order to do the work of transforming all living beings [literally “Buddha’s work” foshi 佛事]. Its ink-dipping and brush-wielding are but the genuine cultivation of actual enlightenment—it is wrong to say that these are nothing but the trifling skills of shallow scholars!” This paper examines how Jin Shengtan configures writing as a technology of transformation at once pragmatic and spiritual, technical and moral. Setting aside the genre-based frameworks according to which his work has traditionally been understood, I reveal how his deliberate attention to brush and ink as inscriptive media aimed to present style not as a transcendent component of literary aesthetics, but as an attainable technique of the body, transmittable through brush and ink.

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Branding “Literary Genius” in Jin Shengtan’s 70-Chapter Edition of the Water Margin

Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 2020

Jin Shengtan wrote his commentaries to the novel Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) between 1641 and 1644, during the final years before the fall of the Ming dynasty. These commentaries are exceptional at least in part because they reflect Jin's frustrations that came from trying to understand this period of chaos. But they are also a good example of how fiction commentary helped to shape the trajectory that the development of Chinese fiction would take, in the form of commentaries and sequels. This article offers a reading of Jin's commentaries to his 70-chapter edition of the Water Margin, to investigate how Jin radically reshaped the Water Margin as the masterpiece of a commentator of great literary genius. It analyses Jin's rhetoric of controlling interpretation and concludes that Jin's ultimate goal was to stabilize and prevent tampering of his "original" 70-chapter edition, in an attempt to close off future possibilities of "sequeling" the Water Margin.

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Author, Critic, and Artist: Redefining Intentionalist Hermeneutics for the Chinese Literary Text

Raymond Dokupil

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2022

This essay seeks to address how the Western scholar in the humanities can approach the Chinese literary text in the post-Saidian academic arena which has problematized "Orientalism." In this this essay we will advocate, in light of Said’s justified critique of Orientalism and Professor Rey Chow’s call to a viable alternative, for a new hermeneutical approach to literary criticism, specifically in the domain of reading and interpreting Chinese literature. I will argue that the foundation of Chinese literary criticism is deeply rooted in the intentionalist hermeneutical approach, and, therefore, cannot be ignored when reading the Chinese literary text. Doing so not only increases the Western reader’s potential for enjoyment, but it also relocates interpretive agency into the hands of the Other, moving towards a discourse of giving the Other authorial control in representing itself. This paper utilizes Wittgenstein's theory of "language-games" to critically engage with post-Foucauldian language landscapes in the West and help us to "dis-orient" and "re-orient" ourselves within the Chinese literary context. This essay draws in large part from Professor Zhang Longxi’s work "The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West" as a research framework and basis for our central argument.

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Géraldine Fiss, Review of Knight _Chinese Literature: A VSI in _China Review International_ (2015)

Sabina Knight, Géraldine Fiss

China Review International, 2015

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The Individual Writer's Voice: Gao Xingjian's Aesthetics and Creation

stephen conlon

Gao Xingjian offers a way beyond the currently prevalent ideologies that seem to dominate literature and literary criticism. He does this by creating major works that offer an aesthetic based on a return to the humanist traditions of literary art and the infusion of Buddhist and Taoist Ways to Enlightenment. His achievement is to blend Eastern and Western perspectives or perceptions that enrich each other and so make possible truly original art. This essay discusses Gao's views on art by arguing that once another, better, way to think and create can be enunciated, we may recognize the passing of what is currently often touted as the only correct or valid way to read and write literature in our universities and in the literary market. If it is possible to be original and cogent in expressing such an alternative, then perhaps we may re-shift our focus back onto the ways we have been writing before the advent of Postmodernist and Poststructuralist ideologies. In so doing, we may also return the writer's voice to the discussion of literature and so re-establish the communication networks we need for great art which dialogues with us as individuals to flourish. Once this is achieved, a new renaissance may be possible that, in Buddhist terms, brings back to life what we thought was dead: literature is not exhausted; the author is not dead; art that sincerely represents the individual's life and mind in verisimilar ways remains the most pressing need in this hyperreal age we have been told by literary ideologies we live in. The form or style of this essay is offered as an alternative to the current turgid and unreadable ways of writing espoused in poststructuralist academic circles that have only resulted in a new poverty of literary criticism and of language. We may need to re-learn how to discuss literature in our own voices: Gao's voice in his Aesthetics and Creation is an exemplary way to do so.

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The Literati s Polyphonic Answers. Frontiers of History in China. 2017. 12.3. 357-432.pdf

Paolo Santangelo

​ The article aims to rethink the pluralistic intellectual currents and social changes of the last centuries in China: how literati reacted to the historical changes, the economic developments, the collapse of the hierarchical order, and the social mobility from the end of the Ming to the middle of the Qing dynasty. Urbanisation, the great silver inflow, the acceleration of trade, and social mobility raised new challenges to the orthodox view of the world and to Neo-Confucian norms. These new attitudes of the Chinese literati – which can be inferred both from literary and philosophical works – uncover new attitudes in the mental structure of the intellectual strata of the time. In the history of ideas we notice a progressive detachment from the orthodox view of the conflictual relationship between principle and desires, especially in the ambit of the Taizhou school. The elaboration of a new anthropological mindset aimed at the rehabilitation of passions and desires culminated with Li Zhi. This trend went on in the Qing period, from Wang Fuzhi to Dai Zhen. Also in literature such trend, the so-called 'cult of ​ qing​ ', can be found with the moral justification of emotion-desire (establishing emotion as a genuine and active source of virtue), and with the vitalistic identification of emotions as the source of life and reproduction. Another indication of the change of mentality is the challenge of common and accepted truisms through the praise of 'folly' in real life situations and literary works: to be 'crazy' and 'foolish' becomes a sign of distinction among certain intellectual circles, in contrast with the pedant orthodox scholars and officials and the vulgar ​ nouveaux riches​. The unconventional character of the anti-hero Baoyu is emblematic, with his aversion for any kind of official ceremony and convention, his abnormal sensibility and impractical and naïve mentality, and his consciousness of being different from others. The crisis of the established ladder of values can be seen in the exaltation of 'amoral' wisdom and in the presentation of various dimensions of love, from the idealistic sentiment of 'the talented student and the beautiful girl' to the metaphysical passion that overcomes death, and to the minimalist concept of ​ '​ love is like food​ ' in a ​ carpe diem perspective​. ​ And finally another challenge is exemplified by Yuan Mei's reflections on the concept of Heavenly Mandate, retribution, human responsibility, and historical constructions by resorting to 'abnormal' phenomena to uncover the absurdity of reality and unconscious imagery. His questions testify the polyphonic debates of the late imperial China, besides established conventions and Neo-Confucian orthodoxy. KEY WORDS : Literati, modernisation, desires and principles, Li Zhi, cult of qing, foolishness, Yuan Mei, retribution, human responsibility

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Buddhist Philosophy: Losang Gönchok's Short Commentary to Jamyang Shayba's Root Text on Tenets. By Cozort Daniel, Preston Craig. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 2003. xiv, 330 pp. $18.95 (paper)

Arthur McKeown

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Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China. By Ying Zhang. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2017. 306 pp. $50 (cloth)

Maram Epstein

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Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (review)

Richard John Lynn

China Review International, 1994

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The Genius of Form: Jin Shengtan's (1608–1661) Transformative Literary Program (2024)
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