Conference Schedule
EMERGING BOOK CULTURES IN ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST
MATERIALITY, PARATEXTS, PRACTICES
British and Irish Studies Room, Norlin Library M549
Saturday, April 6
10:15–10:25: Opening Remarks
Session 1, 10:25-12:50: Writing supports and their potentials
5 min break
12:50-14:00Lunch Break
Session 2, 14:00-15:45: Early writing and paratext
Many titles in early Chinese texts function as mere names rather than performing other functions that we tend to take for granted, such as indicating the theme or the genre of the text. Investigating how and why titles came to perform functions aiding interpretation can enhance our understanding of the cultural role that written texts have played in early China (mid. 5th c. BCE–2 c. CE). In this paper, I argue that the interpretive relationship between the title and the text underpins the unity of a complex work. The early Chinese text Zhuangzi exemplifies how interpretive titles enable the thematic coherence of the heterogeneous compilation on the one hand, and how the coherence effects the sense of authority on the other.
The Zhuangzi, a large heterogeneous compilation comprising 33 chapters, was divided into three parts named “inner chapters,” “outer chapters,” and “miscellaneous chapters.” In this paper, I show that among these three categories, only the inner chapters bear titles that consistently indicate the themes of their texts. In contrast, most of the titles in other groups only function as identifiers. The division between the three groups as well as the different functions of titles reveal the compiler’s intent of influencing the reader in interpreting the texts. The Zhuangzi exemplifies a shift in textual production in Early China: the interpretation of written texts comes to rely less on a direct transmission from teacher to student, moving towards less context bound author-reader communication.
15:45-16:00 Break
Session 3, 16:00-17:45 Scriptoria, textual and literary practice
Mitsukuni’s ambitions were not confined to historiography, and, during its heyday, the Mito literati group comprised dozens of scholars engaged in research and writing on subjects as diverse as history, literature, philology, religion and ritual, and the natural sciences. What brought these people together? Why did they choose to write under Mitsukuni’s patronage and what rules, both stated and assumed, governed their literary production? How did ideas become texts (and often also books) in this environment?
This paper aims to answer these questions by utilizing a new conceptual tool—“community of textual practice,” or CTP for short. It treats the early Mito group of literati as a community united by the shared practice of literary production and avoids the pitfalls of labeling them a “school,” as is customarily done in Japanese and Anglophone scholarship. This approach allows us to look at these people and the texts they wrote from a new perspective and showcases the advantages of the CTP concept in studying premodern and early modern textual production.
Sunday, April 7
Session 4, 10:15–12:40 Creative change in textual transmission
This paper investigates the manuscript production and circulation of unofficial history in the late Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) through an examination of the manuscript copies of Hong Manjong’s 洪萬宗 (1643–1725) Overview and Lessons of the Generations of the Eastern Country (Tongguk yŏktae ch’ongmok 東國歷代總目) and Yi Kŭngik’s 李肯翊 (1736–1806) Narratives of Yŏllyŏsil (Yŏllyŏsil kisul 燃藜室記述). I argue that the medium of manuscript, conjoined with the chronological and episodic structure of the selected works, invited readers to not just emend but contribute to the writing of these unofficial histories, creating scribal communities of those readers who also wrote—a form of participatory history writing where authorship was increasingly collaborative as time went by. While movable type and woodblock printing were available as methods of producing the material text, manuscript flourished as a method of book production for books both acceptable and clandestine. In this media ecology, official, state-approved histories were printed, whereas unofficial histories rarely made it to print and circulated in manuscript format. Hong’s Overview and Lessons, printed covertly in 1705 with the Chosŏn court’s movable type, was embroiled in a call for censorship and was never printed again. However, manuscript copies of Hong’s work circulated widely for the remainder of the dynasty, and subsequent readers continued the chronicle by adding events that occurred after Hong’s death either by annotation, or additions when producing a new manuscript copy. Likewise, Yi’s Narratives also fostered participation by leaving space for contemporary and future readers to add information in circulating copies. Both works demonstrate readerly contributions to writing and illuminate the nature of a form participatory unofficial history writing that contrasted with the reception of official histories.
Keywords: manuscript, marginalia, unofficial history
5 min break
The presence of variants within the textual tradition of Kalīla wa-Dimna highlights the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of semi-popular Arabic literature from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. Intriguingly, Kalīla wa-Dimna, despite its textual fluidity retains its distinct identity as a “book” and indeed the changes occurred through writing. Key to this process were the copyists who both preserve and transmit the text and kept constantly adapting it.
The substantial changes Kalīla wa-Dimna undergoes in its Arabic versions are among the most drastic. These differ from invasive translations into other languages or versifications (among other aspects) in that the latter adaptations are attached to the name of the person doing so, re-attributing authorship to him. Inversely, those responsible for the incremental rewriting or structural interference in the Arabic versions are allegedly anonymous or obscure copyists.
Kalīla wa-Dimna evolves in a sort of transmission that can be regarded as a parallel to the established scholarly way of transmitting texts, which was sophisticated and strongly conventionalized since the eighth century. Traces of those conventions of transmission can be found in some Arabic versions of Kalīla wa-Dimna, such as collation marks and comments on variants. But their attitude to the text was different. Those copyist-redactors engaged with transmitting and adapting Kalīla wa-Dimna might best be described as “scholars of the practice,” i.e., self-taught or literate in ways different from specialist scholars in the established disciplines (tafsīr, hadīṭh, balāgha etc.). This parallel type of scholarly practice needs to be acknowledged and investigated for its own sake.
In our previous research, we have made advances in defining groups of versions and the ways in which various groups interlock or overlap. Meanwhile, copyists and readers leave sparse explicit statements in colophons and on margins. Here our objective is to analyze the correlation between the rewriting and restructuring documented in specific versions of the main text in manuscripts and the perspectives of copyists and readers, contained in the paratexts of those same witnesses.
12:40-13:50 Lunch Break
Session 5, 13:50–16:20 Navigating texts, collections, libraries
5 min break
16:20-16:35 Break
16:35–17:45 General Discussion
Emerging Book Cultures would like to thank our sponsors:
- Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, CU Boulder
- Center for Asian Studies, CU Boulder
- Center for the Humanities & Arts Small Grant, CU Boulder
- Research & Innovation Office (RIO), CU Boulder
- Arts & Sciences Fund for Excellence, CU Boulder
- President’s Fund for the Humanities, CU Boulder
- Northeast Asia Council, Association for Asian Studies