Join us for a webinar on “Water Margin” with Assisant Professor Alia Goehr from the University of Minnesota.
Date: Friday 26 April 2024
Time: 10:00 – 11:00AM AEST
Location: Online
Talks in Chinese Humanities
From its sixteenth-century appearance to today, the Chinese novel Water Margin has incited moral condemnation. The work relates the rage-induced, violent exploits of 108 outlaws in such attentive narrative detail that it seems to condone—or even celebrate—the gruesome beatings, spontaneous beheadings, and brazen acts of cannibalism that fill its pages. For as long as the novel has had its moral detractors, however, so too has it had advocates who insisted upon its underlying moral potential. Yet the moral position of Water Margin’s most prominent advocate, the editor and commentator Jin Shengtan (1608–1661), poses a contradiction, condemning outlawry, on the one hand, while heaping aesthetic praise on graphic depictions of violence, on the other. I make sense of Jin Shengtan’s moral argument by highlighting the distinctive mode of corporeal engagement his densely annotated edition of the novel articulates. Jin’s commentary generates an embodied authorial subjectivity that synthesizes novelistic form with Buddhist truth and, in doing so, aims to eliminate the moral risk of the novel’s content. In closing, in light of this corporeal reframing, I propose we might better understand competing historical takes on Water Margin’s moral significance in relation to divergent conceptions of embodiment.
About the speaker
Alia Goehr is an assistant professor in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches Chinese literature and religion. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago in 2021. Her book project, tentatively titled “Bodies of Truth in Jin Shengtan’s Six Works of Genius” examines the relationships between writing, religion, and the body in early modern China. This book will also provide the first English-language monograph on Jin Shengtan (1608–1661), the nonpareil of premodern Chinese fiction criticism, to have been published in over fifty years.
“Talks in Chinese Humanities” is co-presented by the China Studies Centre, the Discipline of Chinese Studies and the Australian Society for Asian Humanities at the University of Sydney and the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at UNSW.
