This episode discusses the two opposing interpretations of the poem entitled, “Mulberry Along the Lane,” one of the best-known yuefu songs in classical Chinese literature. Traditionally this poem has been interpreted as a representation of social injustice, depicting the situation of an official harassing a peasant girl. The other perspective is the poem is simply a verbal flirtation between a man and a woman and a popular song about a clever lady who employs an engaging and inoffensive way to turn down her suitor.

Guest host: Jui-lung Su, National University of Singapore

This episode analyzes this yuefu piece from different perspectives. As many of the popular songs of the Han, this poem contains dialogue and monologue at the same time. The poem follows a daring woman’s emotional changes from her initial rage against her lover from the south who jilted her to an unsettling feeling of anxiety.

Guest host: Jui-lung Su, National University of Singapore

This episode first discusses the functions of the Han Music Bureau and the yuefu poetry as a poetic genre. It points out the fact that we still don’t know if the Bureau really collected these songs from various regions and matched them with music. Many of the popular poems we now call “Han yuefu” are actually preserved in the History of the Liu Song Dynasty written in the sixth century. The second part focuses on analyzing the yuefu poem entitled, “We Fought South of the Walls” from different angles.

Guest host: Jui-lung Su, National University of Singapore

This episode offers a detailed discussion of the structure and diction of the Lisao and describes the text not as a single poem but as a composite text created from different poetic registers, and different voices, that are otherwise known from the poems of Jiu ge, Jiu zhang, and Tian wen.

Guest host: Martin Kern, Princeton University

This episode discusses how Qu Yuan’s poetry and biography flow seamlessly into each other, and how the figures of poetic hero and heroic poet repeatedly switched places. Likewise, later transmitters, commentators, and poets could appropriate Qu Yuan’s voice with ease.

Guest host: Martin Kern, Princeton University

This episode discusses what the Qu Yuan persona meant to Han dynasty intellectuals. Why was Qu Yuan important to Han thinkers in literary, political, and historical, terms? What did they find in the Qu Yuan persona? How did they identify with that persona of their imagination?

Guest host: Martin Kern, Princeton University

This episode continues our previous discussion of the Li sao or On Encountering Trouble. It focuses on two failed spiritual/supernatural trips or flights in search of Qu Yuan’s ideal and his final decision to commit suicide as the result of his disillusionment with his ruler and society.

Guest host: Fusheng Wu, The University of Utah

This episode discusses Li sao or On Encountring Trouble,” the crowning achievement in the Chu ci repertoire. This poem evolves around the life of Qu Yuan, a poetic persona who is the alleged author of the poem. In the first part of the poem, Qu Yuan talks at length about his glorious family history and his own self-cultivation.

Guest host: Fusheng Wu, The University of Utah

This episode provides a brief general introduction to Chuci; it also discusses a poem in this repertoire, Xian jun(“The Lord of the Xiang River), and its influence on Li sao (“On Encountering Trouble”) that will be discussed in the next two episodes.

Guest host: Fusheng Wu, The University of Utah

This episode looks at the concerted effort by three prominent Han commentators to allegorize a poem made up of disjointed or rather conflicting parts. It also reflects on the ironic fact that Han commentators’ allegorizing process itself constitutes a beautiful exercise of literary imagination, foreshadowing the fruitful exploitation of semantic, syntactic, and structural ambiguities by Du Fu, Li Shangyin, and other Tang poets.

Host: Zong-qi Cai, Lingnan University of Hong Kong; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign