The Early Chinese Lyric “I”: Between Poetics and Hermeneutics

CHINA HUMANITIES

SPEAKER: Zhuming Yao, Boston University

Many poems in the Shijing 詩經 feature a lyric “I,” a first-person voice speaking about intense emotions. Yet, who those “Is” are has never been clear. After two millennia of commentarial writings, we are no more certain than the first critics of the Shi about any of the “Is.” On the contrary, a modern reader is confronted with a range of different readings, each plausible on its own but none more reasoned than the others. This hermeneutical impasse, I show in this talk, results from an interpretive practice that inscribes meaning to, rather than recovers the referent of, the lyric “I.” And the inscription is made not through any serious historical or philological investigation but through free, sometimes idiosyncratic, imagination of the poetics of the Shi—how the poems are composed, in what mode of speech, and with what rhetorical devices. Such poetic claims disguised as hermeneutical solutions have roots in the “I” as a deictic subject position. It helps to generate a group of “type voices” that are inhabitable (and were indeed inhabited) by readers and writers alike. In the broader history of early lyric poetry, these “type voices” were what became “lyric poets.” But no lyric poet in this early phase, I also show, managed to escape completely being a common type.

About the Speaker

 Zhuming Yao is Assistant Professor of Chinese & Comparative Literature at Boston University. He works on classical Chinese literature of the early and early imperial eras, with a particular interest in poetics, philology, and manuscript culture. Zhuming’s current book project examines the literary significance of the oral word in early Chinese writings, offering an account of how writing valorizes the oral form and, in turn, appropriates its discursive appeal. Before joining BU, Zhuming taught at Swarthmore College (2023-24).