Intertextuality and Memory in Early Chinese Writings: A Case Study from Huainanzi

0511999 - OÚ 2020 RIV US eng J - Journal Article
Weingarten, Oliver
Intertextuality and Memory in Early Chinese Writings: A Case Study from Huainanzi.
Early China. Roč. 42, October (2019), s. 201-236. ISSN 0362-5028
Institutional support: RVO:68378009
Keywords : orality * Intertextuality * Textual Memory * Textual Structure
OECD category: Specific literatures
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/early-china/article/intertextuality-and-memory-in-early-chinese-writings-a-case-study-from-huainanzi/3E8B7A17B5F5E60E726406500DD869B4

This article aims to illustrate the usefulness of analytical approaches to early Chinese writings which center on effects of textual memory Due to a dearth of contemporaneous descriptions, concrete practices of oral transmission, dictation, performance, and interpretation in Early China largely lie beyond the ken of present-day scholarship. But recurrence of linguistic-stylistic elements testifies to the presence of these elements in an author's memory Memory should thus, in principle, provide a comparatively accessible perspective on textual production. To demonstrate this point, the article investigates verbal parallels to a passage from Huainanzi “Bing lue” (An Overview of the Military). The internal and distributional patterns as well as the qualitative properties of textual overlaps with other extant writings suggest a composition process that involved a particular type of textual memory. Parallels are fuzzy and patchy, they rarely exceed one or two clauses, they display an irregular distribution across intertexts, the similarities between them cut across linguistic and stylistic categories and recombine in unpredictable constellations. This bundle of characteristics suggests not so much systematic exploitation of trained mnemonic capacities to reproduce long stretches of text verbatim, but instead, a reliance on the aptness of linguistic-stylistic elements of various kinds to spring to mind piecemeal in particular thematic contexts. These specificities are captured well by Boris Gasparov's notion of “communicative fragments.” To invoke an Aristotelian distinction, the resulting effects are close to those of unsupervised remembering rather than the deliberate, goal-directed cognitive activity of recollecting. Looking beyond the present study, it is hoped that future investigations of intertextuality will combine aspects of close reading-as in this article-and methods of digitally enhanced distant reading. This will likely help to elucidate distinct habits of text production and to devise more refined textual typologies, which might eventually feed into more nuanced literary, historical, and philosophical interpretations.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0302236