The TEXTCOURT Project is honoured to have Professor Thomas Mazanec as our third speaker in the talk series. He is going to share with us his article on “Networks of Exchange Poetry in Late Medieval China: Notes toward a Dynamic History of Tang Literature,” which combines qualitative and quantitative methods to rethink the literary history of late medieval China (830-960 CE). In this talk, a total of 10,869 poems exchanged between 2,413 individuals are catalogued to seek the structure of the collectively imagined literary relations of the time. This catalogue is subjected to social-network analysis to reveal patterns and peculiarities in the extant corpus of late medieval poetry, which in turn prompt close readings of the sources. This combination of network analysis and close reading highlights the dynamic nature of Chinese literary history, providing insight into the ever-shifting conjunctures of forms, genres, expectations, and relations in the late medieval literary world.
About the speaker:
Tom Mazanec is an assistant professor of premodern Chinese literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies and, by affiliation, the Departments of Comparative Literature and of Religious Studies. His research is focused on Chinese literature of the medieval period (third through tenth centuries CE). His first book project concerns the emergence of Chinese Buddhist poetry and the rise of the poet-monk in the ninth and tenth centuries CE. Other research interests include literary theory, translation studies, religious studies, and digital humanities. He is also an avid collector of bizarre and obscure translations of Chinese poetry into English.