CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRY: THE TEXTURE OF

This course examines classical Chinese poetry as a capacious and dynamic medium through which poets in premodern China engaged, shaped, and interpreted their environments. Rather than statically reflecting a timeless beauty or harmonious relationship between humans and nature, classical Chinese poetry presents us with a rich tapestry of the living world---from soil, water, farms, and plants, to food, pests, infrastructure, and ruins. We will explore how poets, either individually or collectively, used poetic forms to pattern nature, wrestle with meanings of human activities (such as agriculture), ponder human entanglements with insects and other forms of life, define the moral perimeters of things, and register the embodied experience of human fragility. Beyond thematic content, “texture” also refers to the medium of poetry itself. We will pay special attention to poetic features that are preserved through translation, such as parallelism, allusion, repetition, tones, and rhythm, and consider them as specific rhetorical forces through which poets construct individual voices, forge collective identities, interrogate boundaries between the human and nonhuman, and process historical upheaval and emotional trauma. Ultimately, the course also encourages students to appreciate the practice of reading poetry itself in the age of digital media and AI and reflect on the material conditions of our existence and our own environmental embeddedness.