Yiren Zheng 鄭怡人

I explore literary representations of unusual, and especially nonlinguistic, sounds in Chinese literature from the early medieval to the early modern periods, and my scholarship contributes broadly to sound and media studies, comparative literature, and environmental humanities. My book manuscript, Voice Gone Awry: Theorizing Human Expression in Premodern China, examines literary accounts of whistling (xiao), sonic storytelling, and vocalizations made by birds, and other noisy sounds in poetry, tales, commentary, and reportage from the third to the seventeenth centuries. Although speech usually distinguishes the human from the nonhuman, I show that many premodern Chinese authors urge us to let go of our commitment to language in search for other expressive and communicative potentials latent in a human vocal apparatus and resonances between human voices and nonhuman vocalizations. I am also currently working on a second project that focuses on literary texts composed within dreams as a way of reconsidering the role of authorship in the process of literary creation. A comparatist at heart, I am invested in turning asymmetry between ideas expressed in premodern Chinese literature and concepts produced in contemporary sound and media studies into an opportunity of theorizing the connection between language, voice, and the human body anew. I am also a writer of short fiction.