The Confucius Chronicles

Abstract

The talk will introduce The Confucius Chronicles, the speaker’s forthcoming book on stories about Confucius. The word “chronicles”, derived from the Greek word on time, encompasses history and fiction. It implies unembellished information about the past, yet the word also evokes fictional or even fantastic elaborations, since fiction spanning the spectrum from the realistic to the fantastic has used chronological order as the bedrock of world-making. For the speaker’s purpose, its range of associations means reprieve from the quest for “the authentic Confucius”, the stated or implicit quest of many studies. The speaker’s primary focus is on the power of storytelling in turning Confucius into the symbol of cultural ideals and the engine of intellectual arguments and cultural debates.

About the Speaker

Prof. LI Wai-yee is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, where she has taught since 2000. Her research spans topics ranging from early Chinese thought and narrative to late imperial Chinese literature and culture. Her recent and forthcoming publications include The Promise and Peril of Things: Literature and Material Culture in Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2022), A Topsy-Turvy World: Short Plays and Farces from the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Columbia University Press, 2023), an annotated translation of The Peach Blossom Fan (Oxford University Press, 2024), Gender and Friendship in Chinese Literature (Brill, 2024), and The Confucius Chronicles (Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Prof. Li has received fellowships and grants from the Harvard Society of Fellows, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, ACLS, NEH, Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has taught courses on Ming-Qing culture and literature, early Chinese thought and historiography, gender and sexuality, and premodern fiction and drama. In 2014, Prof. Li was elected by Academia Sinica to its List of Academicians.
 

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