The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography-轻识

The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make divergent arguments, the readability of the past then becomes an issue. Therein lies the beginning of history, the sense of inquiry that heightens our awareness of interpretation. How do interpretive structures develop and disintegrate? What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation (ca. 4th c. BCE). But in what sense is this vast collection of narratives and speeches covering the period from 722 to 468 BCE "historical"? If one can speak of an emergent sense of history in this text, Wai-yee Li argues, it lies precisely at the intersection of varying conceptions of interpretation and rhetoric brought to bear on the past, within a larger context of competing solutions to the instability and disintegration represented through the events of the 255 years covered by the Zuozhuan. Even as its accounts of proliferating disorder and disintegration challenge the boundaries of readability, the deliberations on the rules of reading in the Zuozhuan probe the dimensions of historical self-consciousness.

李惠仪（Wai-Yee Li），哈佛大学东亚语言与文明系教授，中央研究院院士。1987年获得普林斯顿大学博士学位，主要研究晚明与清代文学、先秦两汉历史著作等。著有《引幻与警幻：中国文学的情爱与梦幻》、《〈左传〉的书写与解读》、《明清之际的女子与国难及其回响》。编有《清初文学中的创伤与超越》。另与杜润德、史嘉柏合作英译了《左传》。2016年，她因《帝国晚期中国文学中的女性与国难》（Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature，2014）一书获得“约瑟夫·列文森图书奖”（Joseph Levenson Book Prize）。