Speaker: Heng Du 杜恆
Time: 6 pm CET 20, 27 January
Marc Bloch, a specialist of European Medieval History famous for being as good at history as he was at organizing armed resistance against the Nazi in invaded France, defined History as the mother of all subjects. This catchy definition rests on the existence of separate subjects of study, and of an assumed hierarchical relationship among them. Yet the creation of distinct humanistic disciplines is a fairly recent phenomenon. What is History before that?
And what was History in other cultures of the world? Sima Qian 司馬遷 is, rightly or wrongly, often considered the first historian in Chinese culture, because of his commitment to recording the names and deeds of people who lived in the past who produced something worth remembering. In his Letter to Ren An (d. 91 BCE?), he writes of his magnum opus:
“I have examined [the record of] human action, investigating the principles of success and failure, flourishing and decline. (…) I wished also to understand the relation between Heaven and humanity, and to be conversant with the vicissitudes of history, so as to complete a dissertation of a unified philosophy.” (Translator: P. R. Goldin)
Heng Du 杜恆 (University of Arizona, Tuscon) will introduce the beginning historical writings in early China.
Bio
Heng Du (Ph.D. in Chinese History, Harvard University) is a book historian specializing in the study of Early China. Her current book project, Paratext and the Transformation of Early Chinese Writings, expands the concept of “paratext” to locate the redactional intentions of the nameless thinkers and compilers involved in manuscript production. She is also interested in the comparative study of book cultures in the ancient world, and is currently working on a Chinese translation of Ovid’s Fasti book 6. Du received her M.A. in Chinese literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and B. A. in classics / comparative literature from Cornell University.
Articles
“The Mastery of Miscellanea: Information Management and Knowledge Acquisition in the ‘Chu shuo’ Chapters of the Hanfeizi.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 140.1 (2020): 117–143.
“The Author’s Two Bodies: The Death of Qu Yuan and the Birth of Chuci Zhangju.” T’oung Pao 105 (2019): 259–314.
“From Villains Outwitted to Pedants Out-Wrangled: The Function of Anecdotes in the Shifting Rhetoric of the Han Feizi.” In Between History and Philosophy: Anecdotes in Early China, edited by Paul van Els and Sarah Queen, 193–228. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017.
Dissertation
The Author’s Two Bodies Paratext in Early Chinese Textual Culture
Abstract
The “Linguistic Turn” and the Study of Early Chinese Intellectual History
In recounting the genesis of Gushi bian 古史辨, Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893-1980) faults the Shiji 史記 for its departures from historical reality, for including myths and legends that should not have withstood critical scrutiny (kao 考). Grappling with mismatches between textual records and “how it really was” is a fundamental aspect of historical research. In her presentations, Heng Du explores two methodological propositions associated with the “Linguistic Turn” as possible ways to reestablish relationships between word and deed, between texts and time. Each lecture utilizes as starting points the Anglophone and the Continental traditions, respectively. She’d look forward to a lively conversation about the unique challenges of studying early Chinese intellectual history and how they can inform the study of history broadly speaking.
Lecture 1: Reading Historiography as Speech Acts
Suggested readings
Skinner, Quentin. “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” History and Theory 8 (1969): 3–53.
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Lecture 2: Conceptual History
Suggested readings
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Li, Wai-yee and Yuri Pines eds. Keywords in Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.
Rabinbach, Anson. “Rise and Fall of the Sattelzeit: The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and the Temporality of Totalitarianism and Genocide.” In Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History, edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos and Natasha Wheatley, 103-21. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.