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BULLETIN OF THE DEPARTMENT OF CHINESE LITERATURE NATIONAL CHENGCHI UNIVERSITY NO.30
Publication date： 2018-12
Special Article Language and Life Timelines
Compared with other primates, humans have an extended lifespan and are blessed with the additional stage of “childhood” for learning, both of which are products of cultural evolution. Our brains grow at an explosive rate during our first two years, tripling its weight at birth, soaking up an astonishing amount of information about the physical world as well as the culture into which we are born. Language is a complex set of independent but interrelated skills, acquired at different timelines to different degrees of proficiency, with a great deal of variation across individuals. Speaking any language well requires the acquisition of a full set of perceptual sensitivities to the phonetic distinctions significant for that language. It also requires the coordination and fine control of several hundred muscles for respiration, phonation, and articulation. Although the motor skills for speaking a new language come much more easily to the young, the cognitive components of language, not its motoric components, can be mastered quite late in life, such as its vocabulary and grammar. The various timelines for language and many other aspects of behavior have their sources in the interaction of genes with environment. Several genetic pathologies surface either in infancy, or in the sunset years. While many of us live out the newly available years in good health, some suffer from various types of neuro degeneration, and foremost among these is a severe form of dementia called the Alzheimer’s disease. The challenge of language disorders has mushroomed in size and become manifold more complex with the world aging so fast. Hopefully due consideration in this area of research will be given to the biological and cultural diversity that comprise our entire humanity.
This essay aims to analyze Liang Zong-dai’s interpretation and response to Paul Valéry’s “mechanics of poetry.” As Valéry is familiar with mathematics, there is a space for dialogue between the two poets about the role of scientific thinking in Valéry’s poetry and how he enriches his poetic expression with scientific concepts. To highlight Valéry’s stress on precision, which is also a trait of scientific laws, Liang seeks support from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s and Jules Henri Poincaré’s interpretations on “nature” and “intuition,” and interweaves them with the subject/object relationship and the concept of “universe” in traditional Chinese poetics. By connecting poetics and cosmism, Liang has illuminated the meaning of “cosmological poetics” for a modern context.
Liang Zongdai’s poetics played important roles in the 1930s. Previous research is mainly about the interpretation of Liang Zongdai’s poetic theories on symbolism and construction of the form for Chinese new poetry. It is necessary to revisit Liang Zongdai’s “Six Sonnets” (1933-1939) written during this period. This article analyzes Liang Zongdai’s sonnets and his poetic theories, and discusses how they support and correspond with each other. The article consists of three parts. First, we point out that, by using the name “sonnets,” Liang Zongdai had the clear intention to inherit the tradition and its symbolic meaning in the history of the sonnet. Second, we observe how Liang Zongdai responded to the difficulties that Chinese new poetry encountered, with theories on poetic form and the practice of writing sonnets. Last, we discuss how post-symbolism theories caused poetic effects and conflicts in writing poetry. Through these discussions, we find that Liang Zongdai’s symbolism theories were strongly influenced by Paul Valéry. The alignment of the “Six Sonnets” with symbolism theories demonstrates Liang Zongdai’s desire for purity and pursuit of classicism. From the perspective of the history of poetry, Liang Zongdai renewed the relationship between the sonnet and symbolism, with some limitations.
“Taking the Internal Route” was Liang Zongdai’s declaration of his position on literary criticism. This declaration is not just about reverting from concentrating on objective factors external to the texts back to the texts themselves, but also demonstrates Liang’s profound and unique perspectives. Liang considered the purpose of literary criticism to be the pursuit of “spiritual communication and tacit understanding between readers and writers,” or even the readers’ reconstruction of the writers’ “processes and background of spiritual activities.” “Experimental criticism” became the foundation of his literary criticism. Based on this foundation, he determined that “true understanding and appreciation can only be obtained through texts,” consequently, he established the requirement to “take the internal route.” In other words, when we try to understand why Liang rejected the “external route” in favor of the “internal route,” the concept of “experimental criticism” is key and should not be ignored. This means that we cannot grasp the essence of “taking the internal route” merely from the perspective of “intrinsic criticism” to which we have become accustomed. “Taking the internal route” is not just about the aesthetic experience caused by words in the texts, but rather, about the ultimate purport of the writers’ spiritual experience as expressed in their works.
Dai Zhen (1724-1777) masters verification and presents fruitful study results via meticulous research on thing-naming systems and annotations of classics and related explanatory works so as to trace the evolution of words and pronunciations. However, it should be noted that Dai’s brilliance in verification does not overshadow his achievement on writing. For example, his solid and deep literacy in the studies of ancient prose writing techniques is reflected on his outstanding essays, ancient style proses as well as his commentaries on various famous articles. In this paper, I attempt to introduce and discuss Dai Zhen’s Commentary of Qu Yuan’s Fu Poems written in his youth, including The First Draft. I investigate Dai’s experiences of academic studies and delineate the history of ancient prose writing techniques development triggered by the Neo-Confucianist Movement in the Tang and Song dynasties. Dai is deeply influenced by a concept existent ever since the Neo-Confucianist Movement, which celebrates the idea that studying ancient sages’ lessons and articles can help one cultivate one’s magnanimity. He also continues the techniques of commenting and analyzing the author’s writing intentions from aspects such as organization, the key to introduction and conclusion, context, and momentum of sentences. This is why Dai, when annotating and analyzing Qu Yuan’s (340?-278 B.C.) fu poems, is able to understand why Qu never resented his monarch or easily gave up on him. Thus Dai further celebrates Qu’s noble loyalty and aspiration to assist the sovereign, which are the ways of the sages. In short, Dai’s well written reviews and fine verification skills finally enable him to finish confidently his discourse on the Verses of Chu, which especially highlights the pureness of Qu Yuan’s works, as well as showcases Dai’s aspiration and essential thoughts. Lastly, through a comprehensive overview of Dai’s learning of his whole life, I find that verification and writing techniques, two kinds of scholastic abilities mutually complement to each other, are in effect his fundamental studying strategies. From the academic history viewpoint, it demonstrates that Dai’s studies indeed succeed the Neo-Confucianist Movement style of reading which aims to cultivate one’s mind and writing. Nevertheless, Dai also advocates verification and research as the heart of the matter so as to avoid the major drawback of ancient prose writing techniques studies ─ arbitrary justification of one’s own argument regardless of the evidence. In this way, Commentary of Qu Yuan’s Fu Poems allows us to have an insight into the significance of the academics in Dai’s epoch.
To fully understand Qian Zhongshu’s Limited Views: The Rectified Interpretation of Mao’s Book of Songs (“Limited Views”), this paper deviates from the traditional Classics-centric approach, in order to demonstrate how Qian Zhongshu accomplished the reconstruction of the Classics, going from the “interpretion of the Book of Songs with the Classics” (yi jing jie jing 以經解經) to the “interpretion of the Book of Songs with poetics” (yi shi jie Shi 以詩解《詩》). This paper comprehensively reviews Qian Zhongshu’s interpretive strategies about the Book of Songs, including “consideration of the Book of Songs as a normal collection of poems” (Shi zhi wei shi《詩》之為詩) by tracing back to ‘the six principles’ (liuyi 六義) and “interpretation the Book of Songs by referencing the ‘Arts of Poetry’ (shiyi 詩藝).” Qian Zhongshu’s hermeneutical practice also includes the distinction between “implicitness” (hanxu 含蓄) and “affective image and inner sustenance,” (xingji 興寄) between “only relying on the texts” (qu zu yu ji 取足於己) and “drawing from outside the texts” (bie qiu wai wu 別求外物), so as to “respect the texts yet still put the primary focus on ‘implicitness’.” The contribution of this paper is that it makes sense of the seemingly fragmentary notes in Qian Zhongshu’s Limited Views. More importantly, this paper intends to re-establish the status of the Book of Songs as a classic from the perspective of literature, in the era of decline of “the studies of Confucian Classics” (jingxue 經學). Using “historical research-moral education-art appreciation” as the framework, it points out that Qian Zhongshu’s hermeneutical approach towards the Book of Songs is distinctively different from those of evidential scholars and Confucian scholars.
This paper compares and contrasts Tales of Hulan River by Xiao Hong and The Beginning by Luo Binji. The analysis reveals several new perspectives. First, Manchuria became a Japanese colony after the Mukden Incident. Thus, the northeastern writers were the first to experience the loss of their native place and the fate of going into exile. Life in exile and the accompanying emotions of “homesickness,” “nostalgia” and even “cherishing the past,” as well as the resulting effect of “reminiscence” and related literary activities, were the common life and societal memories of the northeastern writers. Second, through the literary activities of “reminiscing,” they developed a set of approaches to describe the history of individuals and native places, with their views on life and the world embedded therein. Third, although Xiao Hong and Luo Binji both recorded their personal lives and constructed the world of their native places through the literary activities of “reminiscing,” and both adopted children’s perspectives and language, due to their differences in temperament, life experiences, and feelings toward life, the two writers were entirely different in how they portrayed their native places and their literary characteristics. This paper compares and contrasts Tales of Hulan River and The Beginning, in order to gain an understanding of the similarities and differences in the nativist writing and the social memories between these two works.
Guo Songfen is considered one of the leading writers in Taiwan’s literary modernism. This thesis focuses on the research of his two famous works, “Writing” and “About Writing”. The two pieces of writing show apparently similar, but in fact different intentions. As the two pieces are distinct in nature, they help readers understand Guo’s writing idea better. “Writing” presents a quality of “absence” through a fruitless writing process that keeps the writer writing and rewriting. “About Writing” describes the displacement resulted from interpretations among readers, suggesting that a work is immanent and has a creative puissance for the talk (between readers and author) to constantly continue. Both of the two works articulate “writing”: one keeps writing, while the other keeps making mistakes. Through an untimely work, we can observe the difficulty of writing: writing itself showcases the communication constantly blocked. It forces us to examine our own language. Paying attention to what we write is the moment when language metamorphoses into literature, and it is the moment when a work is born.
