Ressources > Abstracts

Abstracts of contribution (following authors' alphabetical order):

Marie Bizais-Lillig: How did Kong Yingda's subcommentary invite to read the Shijing - or the Mao Shi?

This paper focuses on the Mao Shi Zhengyi [The righteous meaning of the Poems in the Mao tradition] edited by Kong Yingda (574-648) and his team under imperial command at the beginning of the Tang dynasty.

The point of the analysis carried on the commentaries and subcommentaries of the poem is two folds. On the one hand, because the analysis looks into the rhetorics of the different strata that compose de Mao Shi Zhengyi, it reveals how the exegetical apparatus is structured and functions in relation with different texts (base texts as well as outside texts). Also, the study links these characteristics of the Mao Shi Zhengyi to the intellectual context of the Tang and situates it in the evolution of scholarship in medieval China.

Olga Lomová: Guiding the reader to the message: Reading Shanju Fu by Xie Lingyun through his “self-commentary”

Xie Lingyun is regarded the first author who provided “self-commentary” (zizhu 自注) to his own poem. He did so in a long autobiographical rhapsody Shanju Fu which he composed after he withdraw from service to the Liu-Song dynasty in hope to spend the rest of his life at the family estate in Shining. (This hope was eventually not fulfilled, Xie Lingyun returned to the service only to be eventually executed for treason far away from his home.) Shanju Fu is a long poem in the format of „grand rhapsodies“ (da fu 大賦) in which, however, unlike Sima Xiangru’s famous paradigmatic poems of the genre, at the centre of the wonderful and plentiful world in Shining is not the ruler, but the author himself.

In the rhapsody, after extoling recluse life and providing a short information about his illustrious ancestors who lived in Shining before him, he describes in considerable detail the natural environment around his estate as well as the economic activities going on there, and presents himself as the owner of the place who enjoys his life free of official duties: He also presents his support for Buddhism and Daoism, including personal encounters with Buddhist monks. The poem is generally regarded as celebration of recluse life, including Buddhist and Daoist values. A distinct interpretation was offered by Cheng Yuyu who emphasised the unique reality of the place as described by Xie Lingyun through his “bodily experience”, and contrary to generally held views about Xie Lingyun’s rhapsody as primarily expression of landscape appreciation related to life in reclusion including its spiritual dimension, she also points out the importance of the “management of mountains and streams”.

In my presentation I will go a step further and interpret Shanju Fu as a statement of authority over the place with political implications in the sense that Xie Lingyun proclaims here independence of the ruling dynasty without necessarily challenging its legitimacy. He uses various literary devices to achieve this, among which the self-commentary plays a crucial role, perhaps even a key to the overall meaning of the poem.

In my presentation, I will first provide an overview of earlier commentarial tradition which Xie Lingyun used and adapted for his own purpose when creating the zizhu format. This will be followed by detailed presentation of different types of Xie Lingyun’s zizhu, their position within the Shanju Fu text and the meanings they bring into the poem. On more general level of the zizhu as a particular form of “metatext”, I will show it as an effort to guide the reader in the direction of the intended message of the poem, something which is contrary to our understanding of poetry as essentially ambiguous and open to individualized readings. 

Michael Schimmelpfennig: "What he really meant was....": Tracing Interpretational Controversies in Traditional Commentaries on the Songs of Chu (Chuci)

The present contribution takes commentaries to poems of the “Nine Songs” (Jiu ge 九歌) chapter of the anthology Songs of Chu 楚辭 as an example to examine how commentators reacted to the readings of their predecessors.
Two assumptions among scholars in the field of commentary studies underlie this contribution: First, the idea that commentaries have been the principle means of philosophical debate in traditional China. Second, the idea that the impact and thus historical relevance of subsequent commentaries on texts with an established reading is directly related to how their authors succeed in convincingly modifying their predecessors' understandings.
The present contribution attempts to test both assumptions by looking at a range of commentaries that followed the influential Section and Sentence Commentary on the Songs of Chu (Chuci zhangju 楚辭章句) by Wang Yi 王逸 (2nd century AD). As I have demonstrated elsewhere, Wang’s commentary set a standard of understanding by building on an exegetical controversy that can be traced through the Han dynasty. But what does 'convincingly modify an established understanding" really mean? How and by what particular exegetical
techniques is this modification accomplished? Do techniques vary and is this variation related to specific commentarial types or textual genres?
The present contribution intends to select and compare samples from the commentaries by the Five Ministers of the Tang dynasty (Liu Liang 劉良, Zhang Xian 張銑, Lü Xiang 呂向, Li Zhouhan 李周翰, Lü Yanji 呂延濟), Hong Xingzu 洪興祖 (1090-1155), Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) , Wang Yuan 汪瑗 (d. 1565), Huang Wenhuan 黃文煥 (jin shi 1625), Wang Fuzhi 王夫之 (1619-1692), Lin Yunming 林雲銘 (jin shi 1659), and possibly Jiang Ji 蔣驥 (1678-1745), Dai Zhen 戴震 (1723-1777), and Chen Benli 陳本禮 (1739-1818), with the final selection pending on the meaningfulness of the samples.
To cover both aspects of text and gesture, the study will employ a combined approach: On a macro level, Chinese commentary histories and biographies of the authors will be surveyed for information on the gesture of the authors of the commentaries, i. e. the pretexts for creating their works or the self-perception of their authors. The emphasis of the contribution will, however, lie on the micro level of the commentarial text: The idea is to focus on commentaries to specific lines of "Nine Songs’" poems that caused controversy, using the commentaries' elaborateness and exegetical subtlety as indicators for such controversy.

Martin Svensson: “A Great Man Divines This”: Metapoetics and Self-commentary in the Shijing and the Confucian Commentarial Tradition

In the fourth stanza of “Wu yang” 無羊 (Shijing 190) we find a metapoetical passage of some importance for our understanding of the Odes and of the commentarial tradition associated with them. I shall work myself toward that stanza by way of the commentaries on odes 1 and 23 written by the author of the first extant systematic “Commentary” (chuan) on the Odes, Mao Heng (second century BCE), and then conduct a brief discussion based on my findings.

Xiaofei Tian: Mastering Meaning: Self-Exegesis in Medieval Chinese Poetic Writings

The practice of self-exegesis, zizhu 自注, is so taken for granted that readers of classical Chinese poetry hardly pay much attention to it. A note, typically appearing in a smaller size than the poem proper does, can be frequently found under the title of a poem or, less often, at the end of a poem, because in the vertical format of a premodern manuscript, those are the two physical places where one can easily insert a note. There is also the interlineal note, which is inserted between the lines within a poem. Those notes normally serve three functions: 1) they identify the who, when, and where being spoken of in a poetic line; 2) they offer further background information; and 3) they gloss the meaning and/or the pronunciation of an unusual word, be it a dialectal usage or a local plant.
The first of these functions can be, and often are, served by titles and prefaces, but there are two important points of difference between titles/prefaces and authorial notes. One is that a note can explain a local detail in a poem in ways in which title and preface cannot; the other is that a note is certainly always composed after a poem is written and speaks strongly to a poet’s concern with the audience, whereas one cannot unequivocally claim the same about a poem’s title. This second point of difference is particularly obvious in a social poem addressed to a friend as a sort of verse epistle: the friend needs no notes to understand the references made in the poem, but a reader other than the friend in question most likely would. There are numerous social poems in the premodern Chinese tradition, but the existence of the explanatory notes in those poems points to a concern going beyond the immediate compositional occasion and the poet’s immediate social circle. In all self-commentaries and self-exegeses, an author actively inserts their voice into a text and insists on a specific understanding—a proper understanding— of a line, a passage, or a work as a whole, through which they attempt to exert authority over a text and control its meaning.
Although by no means a unique Chinese phenomenon in world literature, self-exegesis is prevalent in classical Chinese poetry from the late eighth century onward. In fact, it is one of the formal features distinguishing it from modern Chinese vernacular poems, which are largely devoid of authorial notes. It deserves more critical reflection than what it has received so far. In this essay I discuss self-exegesis in medieval Chinese poetic writings with these questions in mind: When did self-exegesis first become notable and eventually become a habitual practice in the Chinese poetic tradition, and what does it mean? How did a self-exegesis function in its interaction with the poetic text and what does that tell us about how the author envisions each form? In what follows I will first reconstruct a history of authorial notes in early medieval poetic writings as we know it, with a focus on two famous rhapsodies that come with a selfcommentary: Xie Lingyun’s 謝靈運 (368–433) “Fu on Dwelling in the Mountains” 山居賦 and Yan Zhitui’s 顔之推 (531–590s) “Fu on Viewing My Life” 觀我生賦; I read the latter in juxtaposition with Yu Xin’s 庾信 (513–581) “Fu on Lamenting the South” 哀江南賦, the other well-known autobiographical rhapsody from the late sixth century by an author with similar experience who nevertheless did not add a self-exegesis to his work. The essay concludes with a consideration of Du Fu’s 杜甫 (712–770) poetry, which marks the beginning of the popularity of writing self-exegesis for one’s shi poetry.