Current projects

In the paragraphs below, some of our research postgraduate students write about their recently completed or ongoing projects.

• Tyler Pike, PhD in Chinese Studies, 2004-
  “Hearing Voices in the Rain: Reading Du Fu through his Allusions”

I am writing a PhD thesis on the allusive technique of Du Fu (712-770), who has been seen as the greatest poet in the history of Chinese poetry. Focusing on a selection of Du’s poems containing allusions that were frequently used by other poets in his time, this thesis explores how his allusive technique contributed to his greatness. In order to reconstruct the range of expectations his contemporaries may have had when they came across these allusions in poetry, the thesis analyses relevant poems and other forms of writing dating from the eighth century and earlier, as preserved in sources such as miscellanies, gazetteers, and early encyclopaedias. These analytical surveys also inform the theorization of distinct types of allusive technique observed in Du’s poetry. It is argued that, compared with common practice, his technique vastly expanded the intertextuality of common allusions in a number of dimensions, and was one important factor in his unsurpassed accomplishment.

• Anthony Jones - MA (Research) in Chinese Studies, 2005–6
  “Oracle Poems: Ritual Awareness, Symbolism and Creativity in Shi Jing Poetics”

In this thesis, I analyse a selection of poems from the “Guo feng” (Airs of the states) section of the fundamental classic in the Chinese literary canon, the Shi Jing (Book of Songs). By comparing the subject matter of the poems with details found elsewhere in the Shi Jing, with material in other texts (particularly the storehouse of ritual symbolism, the Yi Jing, or Book of Changes), and with what we know about ancient Chinese ritual practices, I establish that this ancient poetry draws upon an existing world of ritual meaning. Significantly, though, this does not mean that these poems of the “Guo feng” are somehow merely records of ritual acts, as has previously been argued. Instead, by observing the creative, ironic and dynamic way in which existing ritual tropes are employed, combined and juxtaposed, we come to see a poetic sensibility at work in the composition of the Shi Jing - a sensibility that takes ritual as an assumed starting point, but does not slavishly mimic ritual acts in its lyric poetry. Such a reading of these Shi Jing poems allows us to understand the text as a forerunner of the rich lyrical individualism of later Chinese poetry, and also as a significant staging post in the development of Chinese literature from a form of ritual utterance to art in its own right.

• David Dayton - MA (Research) in Chinese Studies, 2005–6
  “Big Country, Subtle Voices: Three Ethnic Poets from China’s Southwest”

In the PRC, the re-imagining of the boundaries between ethnicity, nation, and the globe is being produced in ethnic voices that resist the monopolizing narratives of the CCP and the Han cultural center. Furthermore, in the West where the antiquated conception of China as a monolithic Other is still often employed, the existence of these ethnic voices of difference demands a (re)cognition of its multifaceted and interwoven ethnic, political, and social composition. This thesis examines three ethnic poets from the southwest who express this new movement: Woeser (Tibetan), He Xiaozhu (Miao), and Jimu Langge (Yi). They represent the trajectory of ethnic voice in China through the paradigms of local/ethnic vision, national culture, and global connections.

• Huang Shubo - MA (Research) in Chinese Studies, 2006
  “On the Early Promulgation of Law in China”

In 513 B.C., officials of the ancient state of Jin made a penal law code public by inscribing it on tripods. Previous scholarship has regarded this event as one of the earliest cases of publication of laws in Chinese history. Is this notion correct? Some early texts suggest that public promulgation of laws was already a common practice in the Western Zhou Dynasty (ca. 1027–771 B.C.), long before the sixth-century inscribing of the Jin code. Thus, objection to that inscription, attributed to Confucius, may not express opposition to the publication of laws, as often assumed. I argue that the objection was rather to a change in the legal system whereby “flexible punishments” were replaced by “fixed punishments.”

• Finally, Rebecca Tse is working on the following topic for her MA (Research) in Asian Studies, using Chinese novels in English translation.

My thesis focuses on the novels of two Chinese-born authors, Gao Xingjian and Ma Jian, both of whom are currently living in exile in the European Union. I am primarily looking at the themes of identity, alienation, rebellion, and disengagement from mainstream Chinese culture. This will involve a discussion of twentieth-century Chinese literary history, and the effects of exile and translation on the notions of cultural authenticity or "Chinese-ness" of these authors’ novels.