The Literary Life of Things in China

Harvard FAS

This seminar investigates literary strategies for depicting and animating things in premodern China. We will trace the development of the principal genres for talking about objects, from yongwu poetry and riddle tales, to inscriptions, colophons, and manuals of taste. How, we will ask, have authors probed and reimagined human attachments to things. How have practices of collecting and connoisseurship transformed Chinese literary culture? How have objects been used to think about what it means…