EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Premodern Literature 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 36 relations monotone, static, and rigid. Even in the expressive ode “Changdi” (Mao #164), the affectionate praise of the relations among brothers, who “are very dear” at the occasions of death and mourning and who “may quarrel within the walls, but outside they defend one another from insult” (Arthur Waley, transl., 1937: 203), lacks concrete contexts in which one can further situate such relations, not to mention that this was probably a highly styled feasting song for elite banquets. Therefore the manuscript documents unearthed from the Baoshan Tomb 2 in Jingzhou, Hubei, in 1987, are invaluable sources. It is not only because they were archival documents and files (dated ca. 323 B.C.E. to 317 B.C.E.) of the Zuo Yin office, the highest authority of legal affairs in the kingdom of Chu, but also because they contain legal cases and procedures in which we find information about ordinary families being involved in law suits, among which a surpris- ing number of cases were initiated by the surviving brothers of murdered victims. This paper will present and analyze these cases, in particular, focusing on one multi-documents file involving a certain Shu family. Although written in legal prose and documented in the administrative context, these cases, with their varied level of details, offer a rare opportunity to look into the familial relations of commoners of Chu and the emo- tions expressed, implicitly or sometimes explicitly, in the situation of a violent death of a family member. Handler-Spitz Rivi (Macalester College) Imitation Reclaimed Key words: return to antiquity, imitation Gong'an Adherents to the Gong’an and Jingling schools — the poetic avant-garde at the turn of the seventeenth century, known for their aesthetics of self-expression — lambasted the dominant Return toAntiquity move- ment for promoting a retrograde literary style that encouraged writers to blindly imitate ancient models. This unfavorable characterization of the Return to Antiquity Movement, first promulgated in the late Ming dynasty, gained currency during the May Fourth movement, as many May Fourth intellectuals identified with the freewheeling, experimental ethos of the Gong’an and Jingling Schools. Consequently, the Return to Antiquity movement was viewed pejoratively during the twentieth century. But members of the Return to Antiquity movement did not agree on the meaning and proper uses of imitation. This paper examines letters exchanged between two of the First Seven Masters the movement, Li Mengyang and He Jingming. The former upbraids the latter for espousing a poetics of self-indulgent self-expression incapable of moving readers. Comparing He’s poetry to mud that slips through the reader’s fingers, Li admonishes He to return to the study of the classics and hone his technique. In other words, Li suggests that only by internalizing and then adapting the methods of the ancients will He learn to produce poetry powerful enough to move readers. Remarkably, Li’s arguments denounce the kind of blind, rote imitation that members of the Gong’an and May Fourth movements later ascribed to the Return to Antiquity movement. Instead, Li proposes that poetry, like calligraphy, must be anchored in time-honored aesthetic principles, and that self-expression alone cannot substitute for — but must rather complement — technical mastery. These arguments, which are far less reactionary than scholars have claimed, provide grounds for reappraising the role and function of imitation both within the Return to Antiquity movement and more broadly in late Ming aesthetic circles. Hong Jeehee (Syracuse University) Imitating Animals Imitating Humans: Pictorial Agency of Emotions in Middle-Period China Key words: animal, imitation, emotion, spirit Paradoxical as it may seem, the value of “originality” in classical Chinese visual arts was often for- mulated with reference to imitation. Imitating the visible world—be it nature, humans, animals, or their representations—carried connotations that went well beyond copying, and ranged from visual recording of the heaven’s work and revealing the logic of the natural world to transmitting the artist’s spirit in material form. Aesthetic theorists wondered how to represent a model in a way that could transcend mere formal resemblance and convey its “spiritual” essence. The ability to capture this essence became a major criterion