The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China (eBook)

Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature centered on the idea of emotion as space. Tracing how the emotion realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China, this book is a major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture.

LamLing Hon: Ling Hon Lam is Assistant Professor in the Chinese Program in Berkeley's East Asian Languages and Cultures Department. His publications include 'The Matriarch's Private Ears: Performance, Reading, Censorship, and the Fabrication of Interiority in The Story of the Stone' (HJAS 65.2), 'Reading off the Screen: Toward Cinematic Il-literacy in Late 1950s Chinese Opera Film' (Opera Quarterly 26.2-3), and 'Bao-yu's Multimedia Classroom: Reading, Performance, and the Vicissitudes of the Voice from The Story of the Stone to Its Film Adaptations' (in Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone).Ling Hon Lam is assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call "e;emotion-realm"e; (qingjing).Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.