Guest Talk for LIT 217/CHINESE 417 Li Yu and Seventeenth-century Chinese Pop Culture.
When: Apr. 16 (W) 12:00-1:30 pm
Location: CCT E1012
Abstract
This talk examines representations of gambling in the late Ming and early Qing vernacular stories (huaben 4). Focusing on two stories by Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574-1646) and Li Yu 李漁 (1611-1680), I show how the game, which usually starts as a trivial everyday activity, can be aggravated into a gamble on life and death.
These early modern literary imaginations were realized by the authors’ deft treatment of the narrative: inventing the supernatural characters or developing a particular episodic narrative structure. Through these narrative strategies, they negate an explicit moral message on the page. Rather, these authors invite the readers to experience a metagame of gambling: it is the uncertainty about the precise message that entices the readers to continuously flip over the pages, hoping that at some moment they could discover the truth left by the authors. In sum, I argue that the vernacular stories offer the authors an innovative and ideal testing ground to explore both the theme of gambling and the nature of vernacular stories as a literary genre, revealing through their interplay the complex tensions between money and fate, chance and retribution, the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Speaker
Jiayi Chen (cjiayi@wustl.edu), Assistant Professor Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures @ Washington University in St. Louis.
Jiayi Chen is an assistant professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis. She works on early modern Chinese literature and culture. Her current book project, tentatively titled The Early Modern Ludic: Gaming and Literary Culture in China studies how authors, playwrights, publishers, and readers from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries leveraged the critical potential of games to model reading, learning, and thinking, thereby cultivating new epistemological perspectives for navigating reality.
Scan to read the story by Li Yu.
