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Dissertation Information for David Copely Schaberg

NAME:
- David Copely Schaberg

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Comparative Literature

SCHOOL:
- Harvard University (USA) (1996)

ADVISORS:
- Stephen Owen

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: Foundations of Chinese historiography: Literary representation in Zuo zhuan and Guoyu

Abstract: This account of the beginnings of Chinese historiography traces the development of materials and habits of Chinese historical writing through the Warring States period and describes the system of representation which resulted.

Chapter One, "Aspects of Literary Form in Early Chinese Writing," shows how this system is built upon techniques already central to the practice of writing during the Western Zhou (ca. 1050-771 B.C.E.); even the very early bronze inscriptions and preserved speeches of the Zhou dynastic founders demonstrate a concern with exchanged speech and with mimetic ideals that appears to survive in later historiography.

Chapter Two, "Orality, Performance, and Canonicity in the Transmission of Speech Texts," shows how mimetic concerns, operating through a practice of speech recitation, accounted for the oral transmission and recomposition of inherited speeches during the Zhou, ultimately providing historiography with the anecdotes and speeches which would make the bulk of its material.

In Chapter Three, "Speech, Theory, and the Order of the World," I analyze the rhetoric of historiographical speeches in detail, assessing their unique logic and outlining the areas of knowledge which are applied to historical phenomena through the medium of speech-making.

Chapter Four, "Narrative and the Limits of Historical Meaning," describes the various basic modes of narrative in the Zuo zhuan and Guoyu and then identifies a hermeneutic dynamic of observation and judgment as the motive force in narratives. The task of historiography both in individual anecdotes and on the macronarratival level is to bring observed events into line with a Confucian-Traditionalist view of the world's truth.

In Chapter Five, "Aesthetics and the Ends of Historiography," I show how speech rhetoric and narrative habit are linked through a fundamental aesthetic conception which enlists pleasure and fear in the preservation (or reconstitution) of an imagined utopian community.

Finally, in Chapter Six, "Historiography and the Rise of Philosophical Writing," I show how historiography's narrative, its rhetoric, and its fundamental aesthetic illuminate the polemical techniques and stances of several Warring States philosophers, including Mengzi, Mozi, and Xunzi.

MPACT Scores for David Copely Schaberg

A = 0
C = 4
A+C = 4
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2010-10-16 14:40:59

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