East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks: Jeffrey Tharsen - "Chinese Euphonics" - Haun Saussy
Jeffrey Tharsen will discuss his book Chinese Euphonics: Phonological Patterns, Phonorhetoric and Literary Artistry in Early Chinese Narrative Texts. He will be joined in conversation by Haun Saussy.
At the Seminary Co-op
About the Book: What did Old Chinese prose sound like? Supported by digital texts, modern technologies and historical linguistics, Chinese Euphonics is a deep dive into the types of sound patterns that occur throughout the earliest corpora of narrative texts in the Chinese canon: the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, the Classic of Documents《尚書》and the Zuo Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals《春秋左傳》.
Tharsen demonstrates how sound patterns in the speeches preserved in these foundational texts functioned in concert with form and meaning to create "phonorhetoric," a tactic employed by some of the most eminent figures from Chinese antiquity to beautify and strengthen their arguments and ideas by making use of extensive phonological patterning and the power of sound. Containing both a broad history of the study of prose rhyming and a wealth of new evidence, Chinese Euphonics lays the groundwork for a new and more comprehensive approach to the study of early Chinese texts.
About the Author: Jeffrey Tharsen holds dual appointments as Associate Director of Technology for the University of Chicago’s Division of the Humanities and as Lecturer in the Division of the Humanities and in the College, serving as primary university-wide technical domain expert for digital and computational approaches to humanistic inquiry. Jeffrey is known best for his research into computational approaches to philology; he works in a variety of modern and premodern languages. His PhD is in East Asian Languages & Civilizations with specializations in premodern Chinese philology, phonology, paleography and poetics. These days he mainly teaches courses in artificial intelligence, deep learning, data science and multilingual natural language processing.
About the Discussant: Haun Saussy (born 1960) is University Professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and in the Committee on Social Thought. His work attempts to bring the lessons of anthropology and rhetoric to bear on several periods, languages, disciplines and cultures, establishing comparability as a path to mutual recognition beyond acknowledged differences. Among his books are The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic(1994), Great Walls of Discourse (2001), Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader (2010), The Ethnography of Rhythm(2016), Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out (2017), Are We Comparing Yet? (2019), The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature in Multilingual Asia (2022), Ru zhi he: Su Yuanxi zixuanji 如之何：蘇源熙自選集 (Comparatively Speaking: Selected Essays, 2023), and the edited collections Sinographies (2007) and Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2008). As translator, he has produced versions of the Haitian poet Jean Métellus (When the Pipirite Sings, 2019) and the Italian dramatist Tino Caspanello (Bounds, 2020). His current project is a study of the medical NGO Partners In Health, present in eleven sites across the world, focusing on the effects that access to high-quality free healthcare has on impoverished communities.
EAST ASIA BY THE BOOK! CEAS AUTHOR TALKS SERIES
The East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks series showcases CEAS faculty, alumni, and special guests who provide author talks and book launches as a way to engage the broader community in conversations regarding key scholarship on East Asia. This series features a presentation by the author(s) that is often facilitated through conversation with a discussant, following by a question and answer session with the audience. For more information on the series, follow the link here: https://ceas.uchicago.edu/events/east-asia-the-book-ceas-author-talks
PHOTOGRAPHY/VIDEOGRAPHY
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