Guanzhui bian

Pʻu-sheng Chʻen, Zhongshu Qian, Chung-Shu Ch'ien, Qian Zhongshu

Harvard Univ Asia Center, 1998 - Literary Collections - 483 pages

This translation of 65 pieces from Qian Zhongshu's Guanzhui bian (Limited Views) makes available for the first time in English a representative selection from Qian's massive four-volume collection of essays and reading notes on the classics of early Chinese literature. First published in 1979, it has been hailed as one of the most insightful and comprehensive treatments of themes and motifs in early Chinese writing to appear in this century. Scholar, novelist, and essayist Qian Zhongshu (b. 1910) is arguably contemporary China's foremost man of letters, and Limited Views is recognized as the culmination of his study of literature in both the Chinese and the Western traditions.

Contents

• The Meaning Surpasses the Image: 29
• Worldly Frustration and Literary Composition: 35
• Personal Conduct and Literary Style: 41
• Poetic Landscapes and Fidelity to Nature: 48
• The Corruption of Consciousness: 56
• Sadness as the Primary Value in Music: 67
• Saddened by a Height: 74
• Complex Emotions in Literature: 83
• Script and Nature Script and Painting: 91
• Resonance in Criticism on the Arts: 97
• Metaphors Have Two Handles and Several Sides: 121
• Human Life Is Like Ice: 130
• Gifts with Symbolic Meanings: 141
• The Domesticating Metaphor: 148
• Synaesthesia: 155
• The Name but Not the Reality: 163
• Impossible Tropes: 171
• On Not Recognizing Mirrors: 180
• The Motif of the Other Shore: 189
• The Hermeneutic Circle: 195
• Characters with Multiple Meanings Used Simultaneously: 202
• Dialectics in Words and Emotions: 208
• Chiasmus: 215
• Quoting Out of Context: 221
• Poetic Conventions and the Problem of Distorted Meaning: 231
• Literary Style and the Detection of Forgeries: 239
• Literary Writing and Utilitarian Prose: 248
• On Laozi with Reference to Buddhism: 255
• The Insights and Myopia of Mystical Philosophies: 263
• Heaven and Earth Are Inhuman the Sage Is Inhuman: 269
• Modeling Oneself on Nature: 282
• Fallacia Divisionis: 290
• On Not Speaking While Speaking: 297
• Right Words Look Like Contradictions: 304
• Fate Versus Divine Justice: 311
• Witchcraft: 326
• More Joy on Earth than in Heaven: 332
• Time in Heaven Earth and Hell: 339
• Rebuking Heaven: 345
• Born from a Brush and Killed by a Painting: 353
• Stupefying the People: 363
• The Concepts Chinese and Barbarian: 373
• Giving Books to the Barbarians: 382
• Marriage and Fate: 393
• Monks and Lice: 401
• Tears at Partings: 412
• Works Cited: 421
• Finding List: 463
• Index of Proper Names Titles and Terms: 471

About the author

Chung-Shu Ch'ien was born into a prominent literary family in Wuhsi, Kiangsu Province, in November of 1910. His father, Ch'ien Chi was a respected literary historian and professor. As a youth Ch'ien Chung-shu was blessed with a photographic memory and a great talent for writing Chinese prose and poetry. He also learned foreign languages quickly and excelled in English at the high schools that were affiliated with St. John's University that he attended in Soochow and Wuhsi. Ch'ien Chung-shu went to Tsinghua University and reportedly held himself aloof from his classmates, thereby earning a reputation for arrogance. However, he did meet his future wife, Yang Chiang, there. After graduating in 1933, he taught at Kuang-hua University in Shanghai and then two years later won a scholarship to Oxford University to study English literature. After earning his B. Lit. degree in 1937, he spent a year in Paris. When Ch'ien Chung-shu returned to China in 1938, the Sino-Japanese War had already begun. He took a position inland at a university in Kunming, Yunnan Province, and then went on to teach at a number of other places. After the Communist victory in 1949, he returned to Peking to teach at his alma mater. Later he transferred to the Academy of Sciences, where he has been ever since, researching foreign and Chinese literature. His Fortress Besieged (1947) has been called one of the greatest novels produced in modern China, and it has been translated into many languages and made into a serialized television series. In the preface to his novel he stated that in writing about his characters that he did not forget they are human beings, still human beings with the basic nature of hairless, two-legged animals. It is a comic novel, but behind the humor there is always a barb. Ch'ien began another novel, which he felt was going to be even better than Fortress, but the manuscript was lost in the mail during his move back to Peking in 1949 and he never resumed work on it. In recent years Ch'ien has focused on scholarly work in Chinese literature, and he has taken trips abroad to Italy and the United States.

Qian Zhongshu (Ch'ien Chung-shu, 1910-1998) was born into a literary family in Wuxi, Jiangsu province. Possibly the last in a line of Chinese thinkers that began with Confucius, he spent two years at Oxford, majoring in English and learning Latin and modern European languages. During the Cultural Revolution he was sent to a re-education camp with his wife, Yang Jiang. By 1974 he was presumed dead, but he later reappeared at a sinological conference in Italy. Qian wrote some of the most important texts on classical Chinese poetry and literature, essays, short stories, a second incomplete novel that was lost in the mail, and edited various groundbreaking anthologies.

Ronald C. Egan is Professor of Sinology in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University.

Ronald C. Egan is Professor of Sinology in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Guanzhui bian; Volume 44 of Harvard Yenching Institute Cambridge, Mass: Harvard-Yenching Institute monograph series; Volume 44 of Harvard-Yenching Institute monograph series, ISSN 0073-084X; Volume 44 of Monograph series: Harvard Yenching Institute
• Authors: Pʻu-sheng Chʻen, Zhongshu Qian, Chung-Shu Ch'ien, Qian Zhongshu
• Editor: Ronald Egan
• Translated by: Ronald Egan, Professor of Sinology Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures Ronald C Egan
• Compiled by: Ronald Egan
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Asia Center, 1998
• ISBN: 0674534115, 9780674534117
• Length: 483 pages
• Subjects: Literary Collections / Asian / General; Literary Criticism / Asian / Chinese