Agenda

Martin Kern, Princeton University

Repertoires and Composite Texts: What is a Poem?

We know ancient Chinese poetry as fixed, discrete, self-contained units (“poems”) distinct from other such units; this is how it survived over two millennia. But what exactly is “ancient Chinese poetry,” how did it come into being, and how did it circulate in the ancient performance tradition? Rather than thinking of individual poems, we can think of them as composite texts instantiated in various ways from larger repertoires of poetic material.

About the Speaker.
Professor Martin Kern is the Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He has published extensively across the fields of literature, philology, history, religion, and art in ancient and medieval China. His current book project is titled Performance, Memory, and Authorship in Ancient China: The Formation of the Poetic Tradition. At Princeton, Kern leads the new university-wide initiative “Comparative Antiquity”; at Renmin University of China (Beijing), he directs the “International Center for the Study of Ancient Text Cultures.”

Program of the upcoming lectures attached.