Compte-rendu sur <i>Wandering Spirits: Chen Shiyuan's Encyclopedia of Dreams</i>. Translated and edited by Richard E. Strassberg (2008)

Book review : Chen Shiyuan. 2008. Wandering Spirits: Chen Shiyuan’s Encyclopedia of Dreams. Edited and translated by Richard E. Strassberg. Berkeley: University of California Press.Compte rendu sur le livre : Chen Shiyuan, Wandering Spirits: Chen Shiyuan’s Encyclopedia of Dreams, Strassberg Richard E. (éd. et trad.), Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008, 289 p

La marque du père

Pour la théorie psychanalytique, le père n’est pas qu’une personne réelle. C’est d’abord une place, une fonction, qui ouvre au sujet l’accès au domaine du symbolique. Opérateur clé dans l’ordre du langage, il est ce par quoi s’effectuent la nomination et l’avènement de l’Autre, subjectif et sexuel. Son nom est partie prenante du désir de la mère et de la manière dont le sujet y répond, en en passant par ce processus de perte d’un objet imaginaire qui a pour nom castration. À cause de son rôle qui en fait l’agent du manque, la présence du père, dans cette acception, n’est pas toujours facile à repérer – c’est qu’elle relève du signifiant plus que d’un acteur réel. Elle n’en est pas moins opérante. Le Liaozhai zhiyi de Pu Songling (1640-1715), avec sa fantasmatique de femmes toutes-puissantes et « phalliques », d’horreur et d’innommable, ne cesse d’évoquer la défaillance possible de ce nom. Faute de se rappeler l’inscription en filigrane de ce dernier, bien des contes de la collection restent incompréhensibles. L’importance de cette inscription n’est pas le fruit d’une imagination post-moderne : elle est très expressément portée à notre connaissance par Pu Songling lui-même, qui nous dit qu’il porte sur son corps cette marque du manque, qui est la marque du père.For psychoanalytical theory, the father is not a real person only. He is, first of all, a place, a function, by means of which the subject is given access to the realm of the symbolic. As a key operator in the order of language, the father is what brings about naming and the advent of the subjective and sexual Other. His name is involved in the desire for the mother and in the way the subject is to deal with it, passing through a process of loss of an imaginary object called castration. Because of his role as an agent of loss, the father’s presence, in this understanding, is not always easy to spot, as it is more of a linguistic signifier than a true person. It exists and acts nonetheless. Pu Songling’s (1640-1715) Liaozhai zhiyi, with its fantasies of all-powerful and “phallic” women, of horror and of the unspeakable, never stops evoking the possible failure of the father’s name. If one does not recall the implicit presence of its inscription, many stories in the collection are incomprehensible. The importance of this inscription is not due to some post-modern imagination: it is explicitly evoked by Pu Songling himself, who tells us how he bears on his own body this mark of the lack, which is the mark of the father.在精神分析理論中，父親不僅僅是一個真實存在的人，而且首先是向主題開啟象征之門的某種位置和功能。作為語言領域關鍵的操作者，他指定并引入主觀和性的“大它”。父之名關系到母親的欲望以及主體回應這一欲望的方式，主題的這種回應是通過其想象對象的喪失過程——閹割來實現的。由于父親代表著缺失，他的存在便不易被識別出來，因為這種存在盡管很有效，但卻屬于意符范疇，而非實際存在。蒲松齡(1640-1715)的《聊齋志異》一書處處表現出父之名的衰竭和失效，因為此書描述了他對“陽具型”強悍女人的種種幻想，以及她們帶來的那種無以名狀的恐懼。由于沒有意識到上述的隱含層面，書中的不少故事令人費解。這一層面的嵌入并非我們的后現代想象，而是蒲松齡自己的刻意之作，他身體力行地向我們展示了父親缺失的烙印

Histoire et philologie de la Chine classique

Programme de l’année 2016-2017 : I. Représentations et imaginaire du suicide dans la Chine prémoderne (2). — II. Sources classiques des récits en langue vulgaire : entre traduction et réécriture (le cas des contes du genre huaben, XVIIe siècle) (2)

Histoire et philologie de la Chine classique

Programme de l’année 2018-2019 : Fiction et réécriture de l’histoire sous les Ming et les Qing : autour de L’Éventail aux fleurs de pêcher. — I. Fictions historiques : textes, pratiques, enjeux. — II. Lecture du Taohua shan 桃花扇 de Kong Shangren 孔尚任 (1648-1718)

Histoire et philologie de la Chine classique

Programme de l’année 2015-2016 : I. Représentations et imaginaire du suicide dans la Chine prémoderne [1]. — II. Sources classiques des récits en langue vulgaire : entre traduction et réécriture (le cas des contes du genre huaben, XVIIe siècle) [1]

Diglossia and Intralingual Translation in Yuan and Ming Times: An Attempt at a Theoretical Approach: (Part of Panel: Intralingual Translation as an Approach to Yuan-Ming Period Textual Practices)

International audienceLiterary criticism and writing practices in the Yuan-Ming reveal that the literati of the time had a clear consciousness of the diglossic nature of written Chinese, divided between literary Sinitic and vernacular forms. In this section of the panel, the concept of “intralingual translation” will be used as an experimental tool in order to delineate some mechanisms relevant in this particular cultural and linguistic situation. Rather than a one-way relationship between source text and target text, “translation” is understood here as a complex set of transformations rooted in semiotics (Peirce/Dewey 1946, Jakobson 1959), and touching on intertextuality and levels of utterances in text production (Bakhtin, 1975). It encompasses notions of metaliterature and derived texts (Holmes 1970, Popovič 1975, Torop, 1995), with intralingual networking phenomena appearing as typical of a fundamentally blurred frontier, in premodern times, between practices of translation proper, rewriting, and commentary (Zethsen 2007, 2009, Davis 2014, Schmid 2008, Lefevere 1992). These practices hint at the consciousness of an “other language” implicitly present beneath the classical culture (Lurie 2011).This theoretical approach highlights the intrinsic unity behind apparently disparate authorial or editorial strategies, such as: new editions of well-known texts intended at opening up their meaning for new audiences, philosophical or commentarial strategies capitalizing on the tension between the letter of the text and its vernacular development, or massive recycling of wenyan sources for the production of tongsu, vernacular literature. Such phenomena are currently attracting much attention among Western as well as Chinese scholars focusing on the Yuan-Ming period.OTHER ABSTRACTS OF THE SAME PANEL:1/4 General abstractUnder the combined pressure from a new, emerging readership and the consciousness of the diglossic nature of written Chinese, the Yuan-Ming period witnesses the flourishing of a set of textual practices that share a propensity to find new ways of preserving and transmitting textual meaning in new social and discursive environments, while creating modern forms of expression. The concept of intralingual translation is a valuable approach that reveals the unity behind very diverse textual practices, and sheds light into the fundamentally linguistic component that underlie many textual endeavors characterized by such a need for resemantization. As a relatively new concept in the field of East Asian studies, intralingual translation is the object of the first presentation by Lanselle, which reviews some of its theoretical hypotheses, as well as the reasons for which their validity applies to the specific environment of the Yuan-Ming. The following three contributions each explore different facets of this language-related epistemic reconfiguration. Bisetto’s paper focuses on an example of Yuan yanyi commentary that stresses the intrinsic continuity between commentary and translation (or “auto-communication”), in relation with the notion of context. Vetrov points out the importance of vernacularization as a pervasive presence that affects the very condition of philosophical expression in thinkers who, like Wang Yangming, are in search of language accuracy. Sibau’s paper illustrates how, in the context of literary creation, intralingual translation plays a major role in the reshaping of textual sources in literary Sinitic.2/4 Barbara BisettoTitle: Translating into meaning: paraphrasing forms in the anthology Du lü yanyi Abstract: As a scholarly genre, commentary is rooted in an awareness of the “epistemic distance” (Segre 1993) that separates a text from a context of reception. In shortening this distance, the commentator acts as a “broker of meaning” (Wagner 2015) and enables the continuous process of auto-communication that shapes the memory of a culture. Intralingual translation, in the continuum from word and phrase glosses to different levels of paraphrasing, is constitutive of commentary, to the point that, in some cases, the borders between translation (rewording) and interpretation become blurred. This paper explores the overlap of these discursive practices in the tradition of “reading by glosses” (Kin 2010) and examines instances of rewording of single couplets and portions or whole poems in the commentarial notes of the anthology Du lü yanyi杜律演義 (Explanation of the Meaning of Du Fu’s Regulated Verses) by Zhang Xing張性from the Yuan dynasty. This study describes the various forms of paraphrasing elaborated by the commentator to supplement the comprehension and the comprehensibility of the prototexts; it analyzes some examples of translative shifts formulated at the semantic and the syntactic levels of the texts; and it tries to define the parameters informing these choices in relation to possible contexts of readerships. Through exploring this set of textual strategies, this paper aims to call attention to the necessity of the dimension of “distance” and to the centrality of translation practices in the analysis of the trajectories of auto-communication in premodern culture.3/4 Viatcheslav VetrovTitle: Robbing the Canon: Wang Yangming’s Critique of WritingAbstract: In the history of Chinese philosophy, Wang Yangming’s 王陽明 Chuanxilu傳習錄may be regarded as an outstanding instance of intralingual translation: the practice of using colloquialisms for exposing ideas which in his other works are discussed in literary Sinitic. This practice is consistent with Wang’s attitude towards writing. For him, wen 文 is a highly ambivalent concept. On the one hand, it refers to the sacred realm of the Confucian tradition. On the other, paradoxically, it appears as a means of obscuring and robbing the canon (luan jing 亂經, zei jing 賊經). His criticism of bad wen is reminiscent of the problematics in J. L. Borges’ Funes el memorioso: the issue of losing one’s spiritual focus and the control over one’s memory, to the effect that memorization turns into something purely mechanical and leads to a triumph of hypertrophied forms over meaning. Bad wen is primarily a profuse wen: it attests to vast erudition, but lacks something far more important – a belief in the necessity of fostering one’s mind. The frequent use of colloquialisms in the Chuanxilu is associated with orality, simplicity, everyday life in contrast to an elaborated elegant literary exposition. It is motivated philosophically and displays a constant resonance between formal and conceptual levels. As it is exactly this resonance which is absent in the wen under Wang’s criticism, the Chuanxilu may be regarded as a textual performance of alternatives to bad wen. 4/4 Maria Franca SibauTitle: Exemplary Biographies, Vernacular Rewriting, and the Interplay between Classical and Vernacular in Late Ming StoriesAbstract: It has long been known that a great bulk of vernacular stories (huaben) from the late Ming were based on classical language sources, which have been assiduously identified over the decades following the pioneering efforts of Tan Zhengbi and others. Yet, in spite of a few seminal articles that have discussed the significance of these inter-generic adaptations, much work remains to be done. This paper examines the process of rewriting from classical to vernacular by focusing on several huaben from two late Ming collections Xingshi yan型世言 (1632) and Qingye zhong清夜鐘 (1645) by the brothers Lu Renlong陸人龍and Lu Yunlong陸雲龍. The stories represent a homogeneous group, based on classical language biographies of virtuous Ming figures attributed to prominent Ming literati. In each case, the original sources were explicitly cited and sometimes even quoted verbatim in the vernacular texts. This analysis aims to show the fruitfulness of intralingual translation as an analytical framework to illuminate the process by which the huaben redactors reworded, expanded, and recast materials from one genre and linguistic medium into another, with fundamental transformations in terms of ideology, authorial voice, and implied audience. Particularly fascinating are the cases in which the classical text is retained verbatim or quasi verbatim, such as in dialogues and final commentaries, which point to the ecumenical nature of the vernacular text on one hand, and to a strategy of connotative use of the classical for expressive purposes on the other

Histoire et philologie de la Chine classique : 1. Représentations et imaginaire du suicide dans la Chine prémoderne (2); 2. Sources classiques des récits en langue vulgaire : entre traduction et réécriture (le cas des contes du genre huaben 話本, XVIIe siècle) (2)

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This Fearful Object of Desire: On the Interpretation of a Bad Dream in Wang Shifu’s Story of the Western WingGlossary

Zhang Sheng’s dream at the end of the fourth book of the celebrated zaju of the Yuan period—The Story of the Western Wing (Xixiang ji) by Wang Shifu—has attracted little attention. Yet it is of central importance as it involves essential information concerning the relationship between the two main characters of the story and their contradictions. This is highly consequential, as the Xixiang ji features at the core of the Chinese imaginary of love during the whole premodern period. This particular dream scene inherits from a long lineage of textual tradition, and in turn has had a lasting influence on other texts. The interpretation of this dream by Jin Shengtan, which we can infer through his own edition of the play in the 17th century, is highly compatible with a modern approach, as could be drawn from Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire, the subject, and the Other.Le rêve de Zhang Sheng, à la fin du quatrième livre du zaju des Yuan Le Pavillon de l’ouest (Xixiang ji), de Wang Shifu, est rarement étudié. Il concentre pourtant des informations essentielles sur le rapport du héros et de l’héroïne et ses contradictions, dans ce qui constitue la référence cardinale de l’imaginaire amoureux à l’époque prémoderne, dans les derniers siècles de l’empire. Cette scène de rêve est le fruit de toute une histoire textuelle, et exercera une influence durable sur d’autres textes. L’interprétation qu’en fait Jin Shengtan, qui peut se déceler à travers son édition de la pièce, au xviie siècle, est parfaitement compatible avec une lecture moderne telle qu’on peut la faire à partir de Jacques Lacan, avec sa théorie du désir, du sujet et de l’Autre.慾望的恐怖對象：試論《西廂記》中「驚夢」釋義王實甫的元雜劇《西廂記》第四本尾聲部分張生的夢至今少有人研究。然而 ，這個夢在劇中卻至關重要，因其集中了關於男女主人公之間關係及其矛盾的基本信息，同時也成為了中國古典末期文學中關於愛情敘述文學的參照範本。張生做夢的這一幕是前文發展的結果，同時又持續對後面的文本產生影響 。金聖嘆在其批評本中對這一夢的闡釋完全可以與今天我們從現代批評角度根據雅克· 拉康的慾望 、主體和他者理論做出的解讀相對應

Compte-rendu sur McMahon, Keith (1988), Causality and containment in seventeenth-century Chinese fiction

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Compte-rendu sur Benjamin A. Elman (éd.) (2014), Rethinking East Asian languages, vernaculars, and literacies, 1000-1919

International audienceReview on: Elman, Benjamin A., ed. 2014. Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000-1919. Sinica Leidensia 115. Leiden ; Boston: Brill.Compte-rendu sur : Elman Benjamin A. (éd.), Rethinking East Asian languages, vernaculars, and literacies, 1000-1919, Leiden ; Boston, Brill, coll. « Sinica Leidensia », n˚ 115, 2014, 324 p