Wellesley College
A recent paradigm shift in the study of early Chinese texts has reshaped our understanding of classics such as the Analects and Hanfeizi. Rather than capturing the voices of revered personalities, these writings began to resemble manifestations of a textual “primordial soup,” where anonymous sayings, verses, anecdotes, and short expositions animatedly morphed and recombined. How should we then rewrite the intellectual and literary history of early China, one of nameless writers and shapeshifting texts? My current book project, Paratext and the Transformation of Early Chinese Writings, tackles this methodological challenge. As I will introduce in this talk, this work reconceptualizes Gérard Genette’s “paratext” as a heuristic tool for gauging a text’s “social ontology,” or different forms of a text’s social existence—such as being fluid versus stabilized, anonymous versus authored—that are shaped by the power dynamics within a textual community. I argue that the formation process of the received early Chinese corpus involved an ontological metamorphosis, where texts transfigured from anonymous everyday objects into authored art objects, from materials to works, from thing-like entities to person-like entities. The paratextual elements identified in this book—such as reiterations of zi yue 子曰 (“the Master said”), formulaic catalogues, and (apocryphal) authorial anecdotes—reflected early writers’ and redactors’ endeavor to alter a text’s social existence, not unlike spells seeking to catalyze a transformation.
Heng Du (杜恆) is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Wellesley College. As a book historian specializing in the study of early China (before 220 CE), her current book project expands the concept of “paratext” to locate the intentions and agency of the nameless thinkers and compilers involved in early manuscript production. In article-length projects, she has explored topics such as authorship, information management, conceptions of time, as well as comparative study of ancient book cultures.