Emotion and Nature in Classical Chinese Poetry

University of Oregon's Yugen Wang will be speaking at Harvard University as part of the China Humanities Seminar.

Traditional Chinese literary theory considers poetry the result of a dramatic encounter between the agitated interior of the poet’s mind and the sensuous, alluring forces in the physical world, a perfect fusion of emotion and nature, or qing and jing. In this talk, Yugen Wang tells us how his earlier study of the relationship between poetry and print culture in the eleventh century of the Northern Song moved him toward an exploration of these historical, affective, and material cultural dimensions that equip us with a new lens to better appreciate the richness and complexity of the issue.

Yugen Wang is associate professor of Chinese literature at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Ten Thousand Scrolls: Reading and Writing in the Poetics of Huang Tingjian and the Late Northern Song and several articles on classical Chinese poetry and poetics. He taught at Peking University before coming to Harvard for his PhD degree.