Canaan Morse, Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Virginia
This presentation reinterprets the richest account we have of oral storytelling in imperial China, the opening chapter of the 13th-century anthology The Drunken Man’s Talk (Zuiweng tanlu), from a perspective grounded in oral narrative studies. It advocates for reading this famous chapter as a “charter text,” a phenomenon of other oral traditions in which a textual narrative claims to represent a lost “original” text reconstituted via oral tradition. This reading demonstrates that of the chapter’s most confusing features—its exaggerated affirmation of performers’ literary erudition and access to rare books— denotes not an historical reality but a rhetorical mechanism, by which the storyteller invokes images of “literariness” as symbols of immanent culture and transforms them into sources of performative power through a “performance of reading” that is, above all, a display of verbal art. This vision of a symbiotic, non-teleological relationship between text and performance opens new perspectives on the communicative power of performance literature in imperial China and the narrative practices that created it.
