PhD Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
“Reading Games”
Time: Friday, April 15, 3-5pm CT
Zoom Registration Link: https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtce2rrTovHN3QFXUtmrA4xp6cOQa4y4-n
Abstract: This chapter examines a set of “game texts” around a central figure, the early Qing literati Zhang Chao 張潮 (1650-1707), to establish a methodological basis and general scope for the entire dissertation. Game texts, for the sake of my discussion, is an umbrella term referring to literary quotes and other texts inscribed on game equipment, games whose default goal is to read the literary texts successfully, and texts as a notation system to record and reenact games. I parse the ways in which texts join to shape games, as well as the reading experience could be gamified through the manipulations of graphs and forms. I then advance to explore a series of interplays between games and texts, ranging from dice/domino manuals where literary quotes are paired with dot patterns, a game of reading rendered as a screen image represented with graphs, to a weiqi notation system using words to translate the moves. All three cases, as I demonstrate, subvert a common sense that texts prescribe meanings; rather, yi 意 (literally, meaning), could be appropriated to connect and “enliven” the lifeless dots, be triggered when the texts form the image of an object, and be disordered automatically once a game is enacted. Through varied graphic, formal, and sentence-level innovations, games, I argue, have been turned into an active training ground for both historical readers and us literary scholars alike to learn new possibilities of making sense of the texts, thus encouraging us to redefine what “reading” itself means in early modern China.
Presenter: Jiayi Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, with a concentration on early modern Chinese literature. Her dissertation studies the interplay between games, literature, and reading experience, as well as their relationship to print and theater cultures in China from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
Discussant: Elvin Meng is a joint PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research interests include East Asian & European thought, media history & theory, translation, Manchu studies, history of linguistics & mathematics, and modernism.
