The Department of East Asian Languages and Literature is pleased to host Martin Kern (Greg and Joanna Zeluck Professor in Asian Studies, Princeton University) for a lecture on “Materiality, Digitality, and the Sociology of Text: What is Happening to Chinese Antiquity?”
The excavation of the Mawangdui tombs in 1973, which has since been followed by an ever-increasing wealth of unearthed texts, initiated an entirely new era in the study of Chinese antiquity, comparable to the developments in Biblical Studies in the wake of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery, However, it has only been over the last fifteen years that the study of early China has developed distinctive new questions and methodological approaches that push the intellectual frontiers in the field, address ethical and political questions, and focus our attention on the very nature of ancient Chinese textuality. What are the new challenges, paradigms, and possibilities? How do they contribute to the comparative study of antiquity? And what is next?