PhD Student, EALC & Comparative Literature
“The Paleography of Babble”
Time: October 13th, 3-5pm
Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St)
★Co-hosted by the East Asian Transregional History Workshop★
★This event is generously sponsored by the Council of Advanced Studies of the University of Chicago★
Abstract: This paper traces out divergent genealogies of discourse around the status of language in relation to nature and culture in second-millennium Chinese and Inner-Asian thought. Focusing on multiple interpretations of a single figure—the newborn child learning to speak—in the intertwined lineages Chinese, Mongolian, and Manchu thought, this paper suggests that divergent conceptions of babbling as an activity that straddles any tentative nature-culture divide tend to reflect divergent conceptions of “culture” in a multilingual world. Dissenting from Sinocentric conceptions of language that have relegated non-(Chinese)-speech to the realm of non-culture, an Inner-Asian lineage can be traced that mobilizes earlier Buddhist semiotic discourses to construct concepts of language diversity (and the natural-ness of cosmic languages) compatible with the multilingual reality of Inner-Asian empires.
Presenter: 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 & musicology, and modernism.
Discussant: Yiwen Wu is a PhD student in the joint program between East Asian Languages & Civilizations and Theater & Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research centers on early modern Chinese and Japanese theater, with a focus on the dynamic relationship between role types, characters, and performance.
