Leaking Silver, Semen, and Sound: Rumor, Gossip, and the Early-Modern Information Economy of a Chinese Erotic Classic

Professor Pieter Keulemans of Princeton University gives a talk on an early Chinese erotic.

Paize Keulemans (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2004) is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He began studying Chinese language and culture in 1986 at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Since then, he has studied Chinese language and literature in a variety of places: Nankai University, Cambridge University, National Taiwan University, the University of Chicago, Beijing University, and has taught at Columbia University, Yale University, and most recently Princeton. Keulemans’ research interests are focused on the interaction between oral and written literature. His first book, Sound Rising from the Paper: 19th-century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2014), pursues this topic from an acoustic angle, investigating the way a plethora of sound effects (onomatopoeia, dialect accents, vendor calls, etc.) turn the silent pages of printed novels into a lively acoustic spectacle. His second research project, tentatively entitled, Idle Chatter: The Productive Uses of Gossip and Rumor in 17th-century Chinese Literature, explores the relationship between oral and written literature from a different point of view, the seemingly endless production of printed hearsay, rumor, and gossip in late-Ming and early-Qing novels, short-stories, and opera. Keulemans specializes in late-imperial novels and opera, but his interests also include modern Chinese literature, contemporary Chinese film, Dutch-Chinese interactions from the 17th-century onwards, and the adaptation of China’s great novels for contemporary media such as film, TV, and video games.