This episode features a poem that enacts, through incremental repetition, the unfolding drama of a young woman being torn by longing, hesitancy, love, and fear while a suitor is crushing all physical barriers to have a tryst with her. To sanitize this poem, Han commentators resorted to an allegorizing strategy called “cutting off a section to create a new meaning,” constructing a political allegory on the thinnest of evidence.

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

This episode discusses how the anonymous author of “Prefaces to the Book of Poetry” turned “Osprey,” the first of the 305 Shijing poems, from a lively love song into a moral exempla by means of gender switching. It also explains that such imaginative gender switching was made possible by classical Chinese grammar, especially its ungendered use of pronouns and its frequent omission of sentence subjects.

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

This episode discusses how the language of love and kinship is used in diplomatic negotiations through the recitation of odes. For example, a Lu minister uses a wedding song to compare smaller states to a bride welcomed by her groom (the powerful Jin). A woman picking artemisia with care becomes the analogue for a powerful state cherishing a weak one. A Zheng minister uses an ode about seduction to forestall or resist aggression. A Jin leader affirms an alliance through an ode celebrating brotherhood.

Guest host: Wai-yee Li, Harvard University

This episode uses two scenes of reciting odes to explore the struggle for hegemony. The first shows how a fugitive Jin Prince declare his ambition despite his precarious and dependent position. The second features a Jin leader pushing back against the hubristic self-aggrandizement of a Chu prince.

Guest host: Wai-yee Li, Harvard University

This episode discusses how a “barbarian” chief gains diplomatic advantages by reciting an ode now included in Shijing. The recitation both asserts and effaces differences between “Chinese” and “barbarian” states. It seeks to redefine the past and argues for equality and amity between Jin and the Rong.

Guest host: Wai-yee Li, Harvard University

“Woven” like many of the Da ya (Greater Odes) sings of two of the heroes who laid the groundwork for their grandson and son to overcome the Shang and establish the Zhou dynasty. The text lends itself to memorization and may have been part of early court ritual as our own Star-Spangled Banner celebrates an event in the early history of our country.

Guest host: William H. Nienhauser, University of Wisconsin at Madison

The three courtship forms, “I Beg of you, Zhong Zi,” “The Banks of the Ru,” and “The Retiring Girl,” present contrasting depictions of the courtship process in early China. In the first, a village encounter between two lovers or potential lovers is depicted. The man and the woman in “The Banks of the Ru” may be married or simply lovers, but the link to the previous poem is the concern about the girl’s parents. This is the most clearly erotic of the poems presented. “The Retiring Girl” depicts a couple in a relationship with the young woman still reticent to have their love made public.

Guest Host：William H. Nienhauser, the University of Wisconsin at Madison

A brief introduction to The Book of Poetry (Shijing), the earliest Chinese poetical collection. While providing close reading of two poems, it informs us about the provenance, subgenres, presentational modes, thematic categories, and formal features of this great poetical collection.

Guest Host：William H. Nienhauser, the University of Wisconsin at Madison