Writing Naturally: Xie Lingyun’s (385-433) Landscape Works

The East Asian Program presents a discussion with Wendy Swartz on Xie Lingyun's representative landscape poetic works and the role of the Yijing in his poetics.

Wendy Swartz, Assistant Professor of Pre-modern Chinese Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University. "My paper grows out of my current book project on citation and intertextuality in Six Dynasties poetry, more specifically, poetic citations of the Three Abstruse texts (san xuan): the Yijing, Laozi and Zhuangzi. I’m interested in the ways in which philosophical trends impacted and became integrated into the development of poetic practices during early medieval China (both its specific instances and larger ramifications). My presentation will center on a selection of Xie Lingyun’s representative landscape poetic works, including the "Fu on Dwelling in the Mountains," and will outline the role of the Yijing in his poetics. Scholarship on Xie Lingyun up to now has rarely shown exclusive attention to Xie’s use of the Yijing, which in fact reveals much about the conceptual and structural framework of his mode of representation and about how he orders the world he sees. I will argue that Xie Lingyun's poetry exemplifies a literary naturalness that is informed by his reading of the Yijing, an important aspect largely ignored by scholars today."