LRCCS Noon Lecture Series: The Intertextual Brush: Philosophy in Early Medieval Chinese Poetry

A meaningful study of intertextuality must involve examining how a text functions as part of a network of textual relations, and is thus not reducible to influence studies, or a mere tracing of sources. It has special significance and ramifications for early medieval Chinese literary history in light of the fluid boundaries of textual traditions and the dynamic interactions among diverse, expanding repertoires of literary and cultural meanings. It is within this context of a growing body of literary sources and an interconnectedness of not only different intellectual repertoires (e.g. Confucian, Lao-Zhuang, and Buddhist) but also different branches of learning (e.g. philosophy, poetry) that my lecture will examine how writers best made use of diverse, heterogeneous sources suited to their needs.

Wendy Swartz is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at Rutgers University. She has also taught at Columbia University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research is primarily on early medieval Chinese poetry, poetics, and literary criticism. She is the author of Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception (427-1900) (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), the principal editor of Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook (Columbia University Press, 2014), and has published numerous articles on early medieval literature in leading American journals.