Material Culture Meets the Human Body: Anthropomorphizing Ink in Early Modern China
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Abstract,
If one reimagined ink as a human being, what kind of personality would they have? What would their physical appearance be like, what social roles would they fulfil, and how would their life trajectory pan out? This is a question that has occupied the minds of many premodern Chinese writers when producing anthropomorphic biographies, a popular humorous literary tradition which imitated the time-honored historiographical biography format and deployed wordplay and textual allusions to tell the life story of an object/animal through a fictive human biographical subject. The talk will investigate what the mental exercise of embodying the social meanings and uses of this writing essential in human form can teach us about widespread cultural perceptions of material culture, textual production, and humor.
Elizabeth Smithrosser (沈若白) is an intellectual historian of premodern China with research interests in humour, material culture, publishing, and healthcare. Trained at SOAS and Oxford, she spent three years teaching at Leiden, KU Leuven, and Oxford before moving to Academia Sinica. She serves as an Editor of the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies. Her first book, The Misadventures of Master Mugwort: A Joke Book Trilogy from Imperial China was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press.
If one reimagined ink as a human being, what kind of personality would they have? What would their physical appearance be like, what social roles would they fulfil, and how would their life trajectory pan out? This is a question that has occupied the minds of many premodern Chinese writers when producing anthropomorphic biographies, a popular humorous literary tradition which imitated the time-honored historiographical biography format and deployed wordplay and textual allusions to tell the life story of an object/animal through a fictive human biographical subject. The talk will investigate what the mental exercise of embodying the social meanings and uses of this writing essential in human form can teach us about widespread cultural perceptions of material culture, textual production, and humor.
Elizabeth Smithrosser (沈若白) is an intellectual historian of premodern China with research interests in humour, material culture, publishing, and healthcare. Trained at SOAS and Oxford, she spent three years teaching at Leiden, KU Leuven, and Oxford before moving to Academia Sinica. She serves as an Editor of the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies. Her first book, The Misadventures of Master Mugwort: A Joke Book Trilogy from Imperial China was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press.