The Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona is pleased to announce its upcoming colloquium lecture by Dr. Lucas Rambo Bender (Yale University), which will take place over Zoom. Please see below and the attached poster for details. We look forward to seeing you virtually on Thursday, April 14th!
The Alienated Author: Alternate Visions of Authorship in Early Chinese Five-Syllable Poetry
Date and Time: April 14th, 5pm Mountain Standard+Pacific Daylight/8pm Eastern Daylight (via Zoom)
Speaker: Dr. Lucas Rambo Bender
Though early five-character shi 詩-poetry is a highly formulaic, often-anonymous, likely performance-oriented artform, a number of the earliest surviving poems are attributed to writers who also wrote in other genres wherein a robust concept of individual creative authorship prevailed. Given this context, we should not read this corpus as simply naïve, as scholars sometimes have. Instead, much of it represents a deliberate abjuration of the role of the individual creative “author,” an abjuration that is in fact often discussed, justified, and theorized in surviving early poems.
Biography
Lucas Rambo Bender is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He has recently published his first monograph, Du Fu Transforms, with the Harvard University Asia Center. He is currently at work on a new project on the pluralism of the Chinese middle ages.
Heng Du, Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Studies