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School of Chinese Seminar

Old Poems Repurposed: Traditions of the Chinese Literary Elite and WWI Trench Art

古為今用：中國文人文化傳統與歐戰戰壕工藝

Speaker: Professor Ding Xiang Warner丁香教授

Date: 12 July, 2023 (Wednesday)

Time: 16:30-18:00 (HKT, GMT+8)

Venue: Rm730, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Language: English and Putonghua

Abstract 摘要

The usual procedures of the scholar of Chinese poetry, when asking the question “What is the meaning of this Chinese poem?,” are familiar and generally reliable. Whether we ask the question about a poem’s “original meaning,” a meaning intended by its author, or about the meanings that accrued to the poem in its reception by readers over time, the meanings for which the poem earned a “place” in Chinese literary tradition, there are rich scholarly resources and time-tested methodological tools that help us to work out answers, even if tentatively. How, though, is the task of the literary historian complicated, how are the meanings of a Chinese poem affected, when it and its Chinese readers are “uprooted” from their native land, transported out of their cultural milieu into another? This seminar talk takes up these questions by way of an examination of Chinese poems that were transcribed in Europe during or just after World War I by anonymous members of the Chinese Labour Corps serving the Allied war effort.

作為研究中國詩歌的學者，當我們探討一首詩的含意時，我們可以依循熟悉可靠的常規慣例尋找解答。不論我們是要揭示一首詩的「本意」，也就是其作者想要表達的意思，還是要搜尋一首詩在流傳過程中累積了各時代讀者反應的含義，也就是致使一首詩在文學傳統上定位的含義，我們都有豐富的資源和久經考驗的方法和工具幫助我們澄清疑點。然而，如果一首中文詩以及它的中國讀者都從其原本文化環境遷移到另一個文化環境，這會如何影響我們對詩中含義的理解？又會如何使我們的文學史研究變得複雜化？這個講座以旅歐中國勞工團成員在一戰期間或戰後清理戰場期間抄刻的幾首古詩為例，商討上列問題。

Bio 簡介

Professor Ding Xiang Warner received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington and is currently teaching in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Her research focuses on Chinese literature and literary thought from Han dynasty through the early Song, early and medieval Chinese intellectual history, and the study of textual production and text culture in pre-modern China. She was honored with a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and awarded a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society.

丁香教授，華盛頓大學哲學博士，康奈爾大學亞洲研究系教授。她的研究涵蓋上古至近代中國文學領域，包括漢代至宋初文學思想、上古與中古中國思想史，以及近代中國文學文本生成和文化研究。丁教授獲美國學術團體協會頒授院士榮銜，並曾獲得美國哲學會富蘭克林研究資助基金。

Registration 報名連結: https://shorturl.at/cvEGW