403 Kent Hall + Zoom link below
Critical Chinese Humanities Colloquium
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society; The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities; Center for Comparative Media; Weatherhead East Asian Institute
“Poetry puts intent into words; singing lengthens words”—one of the earliest Chinese comments on artistic expression. Poetic language extends the reach of a sentiment beyond the individual, and musicality extends the reach of poetic language, not only across a room, but across geography and generations. The “extended mind thesis” (EMT) views minds as extending beyond individual nervous systems to include material and social environments.
Even as it valorizes textual authority, the Chinese tradition prized the oral stratum as source of novel, authentic musical-poetic expression. With reference to theories like EMT and memory “chunking,” Music, Mind, and Language in Chinese Poetry and Performance: The Voice Extended (Oxford UP, 2024), fills in missing parts of cyclical, continuous interactions between social minds and material artifacts in ways that explain not only the trajectory of Chinese arts, but also more general phenomena, like vernacularization and improvisation.
Casey Schoenberger completed his PhD in Chinese literature at Yale University in 2013. He is currently a lecturer in Rice University’s Department of Transnational Asian Studies. His research and teaching focus on cognitive, comparative, digital, musicological, and linguistic approaches to East Asian literature and performing arts.
