This talk is part of the Center for East Asian Studies
CHINA BROWN BAG SERIES
Sometime between the beginning of the sixth century and the mid-seventh century the couplet became the medium by which to reflect on the categories of poetics and the work of individual poets. Professor Stephen Owen will consider the changing use of the couplet to reflect "essential" qualities in poetics and poets from the seventh through the thirteenth centuries. The selection of couplets as "touchstones" in poetics had obvious consequences on poetic composition, most obvious in the ninth century, by which time the poem as a whole often became only the frame or "setting" for the jewel of a memorable couplet.
The speaker, Stephen Owen, focuses on premodern Chinese literature, lyric poetry, and comparative poetics. Much of his previous work has looked at the middle period of Chinese Literature (200-1200); however, he is currently engaged in writing a collection of essays on Chinese literature of the early period. He has a concurrent interest in Chinese drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His most recent books have been: An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (Norton 1996), The End of the Chinese "Middle Ages" (Stanford, 1996), Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Harvard, 1992), Mi-lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire (Harvard, 1989), Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Harvard, 1986), and Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics (Wisconsin, 1985). Three earlier books on Chinese poetry were published by Yale.