Professor Xiaofei Tian, Harvard University
As part of Professor Tian’s forthcoming book, Writing Empire and Self: Poetic Revolution and Cultural Transformation in Early Medieval China, this talk considers how limpidity, qing, a key concept in the political culture of early medieval China, was appropriated by elite writers as an aesthetic ideal and an important way of self-fashioning in the last decades of the fifth century. In their poetry, the courtier poets constantly negotiate between limpidity and interiority, transparency and depth, being known for what they are and maintaining a reservedness that is as much a class marker as a measure for personal capacity. This talk concludes with a discussion of “thing poetry,” arguing that its flourishing in this period was closely connected with poets’ interest in the dialectic of knowability and invisibility.