Who Is Speaking to Whom? Mapping Poetic Roles for Poetry in the Five-Syllable Line in Early Medieval China

Qiulei Hu gives a talk on poetry in Early Medieval China.

Qiulei Hu, Assistant Professor, Chinese Language and Literature Whitman College

For more information, please email jsbyers@uw.edu.

One of the first and foremost steps in traditional Chinese poetic interpretation is to determine who is speaking to whom in a poem. As many poems are meant to be read as first-person monologue, the speaker’s role, usually characterized by a definite gender, identity and relationship with the addressee, directly affects the way in which readers understand the meaning and implications of a poem. A close examination, however, reveals remarkable indeterminacy in poetic roles in early poetry in the five-syllable line. By comparing some poems with their imitations or interpretations in the following centuries, I will show that by the fifth and sixth centuries, this indeterminacy came to be seen as a problem and various efforts were made to amend it. At the same time conventions were established for representing and recognizing different roles in poetic expression. Through an analysis of the greater cultural context, including the changing concept about authorship and canonization of early poems in the five-syllable line, I will also explain why this change of perception occurred during the fifth and sixth centuries. This study attempts to shed light on how our received traditions came into being, and draw attention to a more diverse reading of early poetry in the five-syllable line.

Qiulei Hu is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Whitman College, where she teaches courses on pre-modern Chinese literature and Chinese language. She received her MA in Chinese literature from Peking University and PhD in pre-modern Chinese literature from Harvard University. She specializes in early medieval Chinese poetry, with a focus on gender issues and the tradition of male writing in the feminine voice. Her recent publications include “Reading the Conflicting Voices: An Examination of the Interpretative Traditions about ‘Han Guang’” in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 34 (2012). She is currently working on a book project based on her dissertation, “Gender and Voice in Early Medieval Chinese Poetry,” in which she discusses how poetic expressions about women and female gender markers were established and stabilized during the third to sixth century.