A New Perspective on Dream of The Red Chamber : The Concealed Aristocratic Culture of Traditional China)

 
 
Speaker： 歐麗娟（國立臺灣大學中文系教授）
Date： 2016 年 04 月 08 日（五）下午 3：00 至 下午 5：00
Location： Scholars Commons, Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL), University of Texas at Austin, U.S.A.
Dream of the Red Chamber is an aristocratic novel unique in Chinese literature. As a narrative about several aristocratic families by an author of noble birth, naturally the hierarchies of aristocracy should be an essential frame of reference for understanding Dream of the Red Chamber. But for over a century the novel has been interpreted from a non-aristocratic or sometimes even an anti-aristocratic perspective. This has happened for several reasons: chief among them, and perhaps the most important one nowadays, is simply that misunderstandings of the text have arisen due to the huge and fundamental cultural upheavals of the past century of Chinese history. After over a century of rich and wonderful readings of Dream of the Red Chamber, I propose we attempt to rediscover the sense of those people and events against an aristocratic background, or rather, in the original text and context of the novel. This perspective may give rise to a new understanding of this great novel.

※This speech will be delivered in Chinese.
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