The Craft of Oblivion is an innovative and groundbreaking volume that aims to study, for the first time, the intersections between forgetting and remembering in classical Chinese civilization. Oblivion has tended to be relegated to a marginal position, often conceived as the mere destructive or undesirable opposite of memory, even though it performs an essential function in our lives. Forgetting and memory, far from being autonomous and mutually exclusive spheres, should be seen as interdependent phenomena. Drawing on perspectives from history, philosophy, literature, and religion, and examining both transmitted texts and excavated materials, the contributors to this volume analyze various ways of understanding oblivion and its complex and fertile relations with memory in ancient China.
Product Details
ISBN-13: 9781438493763
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Publication Date: 01-02-2024
Pages: 380
Product Dimensions: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.85d
Series: Suny Chinese Philosophy and Culture
About the Author
Albert Galvany Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Albert Galvany
PART I. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL AND POLITICAL NARRATIVES
1. Cultural Amnesia and Commentarial Retrofitting: Interpreting the Spring and Autumn Newell Ann Van Auken
2. Elision and Narration: Remembering and Forgetting in Some Recently Unearthed Historiographical Manuscripts Rens Krijgsman
3. Shaping the Historian’s Project: Language of Forgetting and Obliteration in the Shiji Esther Sunkyung Klein
4. The Ice of Memory and the Fires of Forgetfulness: Traumatic Recollections in the Wu Yue Chunqiu Olivia Milburn
PART II. PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS
5. The Daode jing’s Forgotten Forebear: The Ancestral Cult K. E. Brashier
6. So Comfortable You’ll Forget You’re Wearing Them: Attention and Forgetting in the Zhuangzi and Huainanzi Franklin Perkins
7. The Practice of Erasing Traces in the Huainanzi Tobias Benedikt Zürn
8. The Oblivious against the Doctor: Pathologies of Remembering and Virtues of Forgetting in the Liezi Albert Galvany
9. Wang Bi and the Hermeneutics of Actualization Mercedes Valmisa
PART III. RITUAL AND LITERARY TEXTS
10. Embodied Memory and Natural Forgetting in Early Chinese Ritual Theory Paul Nicholas Vogt
11. Exile and Return: Oblivion, Memory, and Nontragic Death in Tomb-Quelling Texts from the Eastern Han Dynasty Xiang Li
12. Lost in Where We Are: Tao Yuanming on the Joys of Forgetting and the Worries of Being Forgotten Michael D. K. Ing