Events
Public Lecture: Doubts about Doubting Chinese Antiquity as well as its Critics
5 Jun 2017
2:30pm – 4:00pm
Digital Scholarship Lab, G/F, University Library, CUHK
Prof. Rudolf Wagner (Heidelberg University)
Rudolf Wagner is Senior Professor with the Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University, and Co-Director of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows’. His publications include A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi’s commentary on the Laozi with critical text and translation (2003), Language, Ontology, and Political Philosophy: Wang Bi’s Scholarly Exploration of the Dark (Xuanxue) (2003), Inside a Service Trade. Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose (1992), The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi (2000), The Contemporary Chinese Historical Drama: Four Studies.(1990), and Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion(1984).
Registration: https://goo.gl/forms/rtDkMdbD63ydXzsm1
3943 1255 / cuccs@cuhk.edu.hk
This is a study of the background, impact, and cost of the “doubting antiquity,” yigu, current associated with the Gushi bian collection that followed a strong political agenda of undoing the authority of the orthodox view of Chinese history with the authority of scholarly criticism. It traces its background against the claims by the initiator and editor of this collection, Gu Jiegang, that his inspirations all came from the Chinese scholarly tradition to an international discussion about the relationship between myth and history and the proper ways to read myth, a discussion that had its origins in German classical philology and Protestant theology, and reached China via Japanese contributions. It sketches the international impact of the yigu current in a case study about the strategies for dating and editing the Laozi before the recent finds of early manuscripts. Finally it outlines the cost of the strong political agenda of both the yigu current and its present-day critics by showing how the focus on the genuine/fake issue left many highly relevant questions concerning the methodology of editing the newly-found manuscripts unasked and unanswered.
Website: http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/crs/ccs
