Global Philology：An International Lecture Series

Early Chinese Philology

Title: Early Chinese Philology

Moderator: XU Jianwei, Renmin University of China

Speaker: Martin Kern, Princeton University

Time: 21:00-22:30 (GMT+8), December 14, 2022.

Zoom Meeting ID: 922 3991 6850 (Code: 1111)

Zoom Link:

https://zoom.us/j/92239916850?pwd=MnhBaGxZY1ZpQ3BGMWovRHR1U0h2QT09

About the Speaker:

Martin Kern is the Joanna and Greg ’84 P13 P18 Zeluck Professor in Asian Studies. He also serves as co-editor of T’oung Pao and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. At Princeton, Kern directs the university-wide collaboration “Comparative Antiquity: A Humanities Council Global Initiative.” At Renmin University of China (Beijing), he directs the “International Center for the Study of Ancient Text Cultures.” Kern’s numerous publications, including ten authored or edited books, address topics across all genres of ancient Chinese literature, including poetry as cultural memory and as performance in political and religious ritual; authorship; writing and orality; methodological issues in manuscript studies; early literary thought; and style and rhetoric in philosophy and historiography.

Abstract for Lecture:

The Chinese tradition can legitimately claim a continuous indigenous commitment to textual scholarship for 2,500 years. Over time, this commitment led to a vast accumulation of philological practice in tens of thousands of works, with many earlier commentaries themselves becoming canonical and the subject of subsequent layers of subcommentaries, that is, commentaries to commentaries. In his lecture, Professor Martin Kern will examine the beginnings and early period of this development; attempt to define the incipient range of what could be conceived as philological practices in the last centuries before the common era; and discuss the principal questions, characteristics, and institutional structures of ancient philology in and for the formation of the Chinese text culture. The lecture will further reflect critically on our own conceptualizations—and misconceptualizations—of ancient textual practices, in particular in light of today’s new engagement with ancient Chinese manuscripts that have been discovered in large numbers over the last half century.