Dartmouth Events

“Who Were You?: Wonder and the Aesthetics of Subjectivity in the Poetry of the Tang Dynasty (618-907)”

A public lecture by Paula Varsano, Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of California, Berkeley

What are we reading—or, more precisely, what are we reading for—when, today, we pick up an anthology of Tang Dynasty Chinese lyric poetry? If we followed the wishes of the poets themselves, we would read in order to feel what they felt and, most importantly, to understand who they were.  Their words would stir in us the vivid and visceral sense that, though now absent, they were as “real”—as complex, specific and, ultimately, unfathomable—as we ourselves are.  In this lecture, we will explore the notion of lyric subjectivity as it is manifest in some of the best-known poems of the era and consider what it means to take seriously the role of aesthetics in our encounter with the literary arts.

Paula Varsano, Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, earned a B.A. in East Asian Studies at Yale University and a PhD in Chinese Literature at Princeton University. She specializes in classical Chinese poetry and thought from the 3rd through the 11th centuries, with particular interest in the intersections between Chinese literary practice and philosophical notions of the self and subjectivity. Selected publications include Tracking the Banished Immortal: The Poetry of Li Bo and its Critical Reception (University of Hawaii Press, 2003), In Praise of Blandness (the English translation of François Jullien's Éloge de la fadeur, Zone Books, 2004), and the edited volume, The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture (SUNY, 2016). She is currently completing work on the book, Knowing and Being Known: The Lyric Subject in Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics.

Sponsored by the Dept. of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages with funding from the Dean of the Faculty. Free and open to the public.