The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China

Ling Hon Lam

Ling Hon Lam

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China

From Dreamscapes to Theatricality

Columbia University Press | 2018

https://doi.org/10.7312/lam-18794

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About this book

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.

Author information

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.

Reviews

Patricia Sieber, Ohio State University:
A provocative, profound, and profoundly original rethinking of the history of Chinese literary thought and its literary manifestations in imperial and modern China, whose repercussions will be felt within Chinese studies and within world literary circles for a long time to come.

Haun Saussy, University of Chicago:
Sounds, including words, reverberate in spaces, including the “inch-space” of the heart. Framing the history of the emotions in original and surprising ways and undoing traditional oppositions between “inside” and “outside” through attention to the spaces that nurture or limit feeling, Ling Hon Lam puts Chinese vernacular literature in a new place and gives us the sensation of belonging to a continuous, centuries-long community of spectators. This is cultural history of astonishing scope and imagination.

Wai-yee Li, Harvard University:
Lam argues with verve that the vocabulary of spatiality and theatricality is crucial for understanding emotions in the Chinese tradition. From the earliest formulations of the functions of poetic articulation as a space of social, political, and cosmic resonance to the logic of self-division and of being a spectator to one's emotions in Ming fiction, Lam offers new and interesting perspectives on Chinese literature.

William Egginton, Johns Hopkins University:
The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China is a daring rethinking of emotion as it was conceptualized in early modern China. Up-ending the dominant characterization of emotions, Ling Hon Lam shows that emotions were implicitly situations of space, conceived of and perceived in spatial terms. Challenging expectations and rectifying suppositions about the most basic level of human interaction with the environment and culture, Lam elucidates questions central to the philosophy of affect and to ontology from an unprecedented comparative perspective.

Wei Shang, Columbia University:
Brilliantly written and boldly conceptualized.

David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University:
Ling Hon Lam’s book is a major breakthrough in early modern Chinese literary and theater studies. Lam challenges conventional wisdom that sees emotion as an expression of inner faculties, and seeks to reframe emotion as affective performativity, theatrical manifestation, and above all, spatial construct. He draws from performing arts and media studies, identifies philosophical and psychological contestations, and ponders the power of the theatrics of emotion both on the stage and in everyday life. Historically informed and theoretically provocative, Lam’s book will set a new standard for Chinese theater studies and cultural and spatial history.

Frontmatter Free access PDF PDF	i
Contents Free access PDF PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	ix
Prologue: Weather and Landscape Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	1
Winds, Dreams, Theater: A Genealogy of Emotion-Realms Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	19
The Heart Beside Itself: A Genealogy of Morals Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	53
What Is Wrong with The Wrong Career? A Genealogy of Playgrounds Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	91
“Not Even Close to Emotion”: A Genealogy of Knowledge Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	147
Time-Space Is Emotion Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	188
Notes Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	243
Index Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	323

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China

From Dreamscapes to Theatricality

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