Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation International Sinological Center in Prague invites you to
Wang Wei (699-761), along with Li Bai and Du Fu, is generally known as one of the “Holy Trinity” of Tang poetry and as such he is well remembered even outside the circles of students of Chinese literature. Generally known as the greatest nature poet of the Tang, whose tranquil, seemingly simple landscapes can be read as expressions of Buddhist, particularly chan experience, Wang Wei is also one of the very few Chinese poets translated into western languages, and a poet who even inspired western modernists in their experimentations. Wang Wei is also an important figure in the history of Chinese painting, despite the fact that very little of his art has been preserved.
There is no doubt that Wang Wei is an important figure in Chinese literature and culture, however recently Chinese literature studies in Europe are more preoccupied with fiction rather than poetry and with modern periods rather the Tang. The aim of this summer school is to introduce Wang Wei’s poetic art to students of sinology who do not necessarily specialize in Tang poetry studies. At the same time scholars from Europe and Taiwan through lectures, readings and interpretations of poems from various perspectives will offer new perspectives on Wang Wei which will certainly be of interest also to Tang poetry students.
NEW! Prague Summer School 2023 booklet for download
Day 1: Monday September 4
9.00 – 11.30: Morning session
Olga Lomová (Charles University): Wang Wei – court poet and “recluse” of the Golden Age of Chinese poetry I
13.00 – 16.30: Afternoon session with reading
Tero Tähtinen (University of Tampere): Wang Wei as a Buddhist poet
Day 2: Tuesday September 5
9.00 – 12.30: Morning session
Olga Lomová (Charles University): Wang Wei – court poet and “recluse” of the Golden Age of Chinese poetry II, with reading
14.00 – 15.30: Afternoon reading
Olga Lomová: The Wangchuan series (輞川集)
Day 3: Wednesday September 6
9.00 – 12.30: Morning session
Leonard Kwok Kou Chan (陳國球) (National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu): Reception of Wang Wei in later periods and issues of shaping an ideal Tang poet
2023-9-6 Prague Summer School 王維在中國文學史
14.00 – 16.00: Afternoon reading
Day 4: Thursday September 7
9.00 – 12.30: Morning session
Yang Zhiyi (楊治宜) (JWG University Frankfurt am Main): Wang Wei in Republican China
Yang Zhiyi Wang Wei in Republican China-new
14.00 – 15.30: Afternoon session
Michaela Pejčochová (National Gallery, Prague): Wang Wei in the history of Chinese painting
Michaela Pejcochova_prednaska_7_9_2023
Day 5: Friday September 8
9.00-12.30: Morning session
Frank Kraushaar (National Library of Latvia): Appropriation of Wang Wei by modern Western poets
Frank Kraushaar Wang Wei to Modern Poets and Vice Versa.pptx
Bibliography
Sources for Tang Poetry Studies
Leonard Kwok Kou Chan (陳國球) (National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu)
Kwok Kou Leonard CHAN is currently holding positions as a Yushan Scholar Chair Professor at National Tsing Hua University and Fellow of The Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. His past experience includes positions at The Education University of Hong Kong as Chair Professor of Chinese Literature and the Founding Dean of the Faculty of Humanities.
Leonard Chan’s areas of expertise include Chinese literary criticism, literary historiography, Hong Kong literature, and Chinese-Western comparative literature. His research outputs encompass more than 20 books, including The Reception of Tang Poetry in Ming Neo-Classical Criticism (唐詩的傳承：明代復古詩論研究), and over a hundred of research articles. Leonard Chan’s latest publication Discourses on Chinese Lyrical Tradition and Literary Historiography (抒情傳統論與中國文學史) would best manifest his study of “Chinese Lyrical Tradition” over the years. The book spans through academic traditions of the Continental Europe, North America and the Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and exhibits the dynamics and diversity of the relevant discourses in relation to the comparative study of Chinese literature.
Frank Kraushaar (National Library of Latvia)
Frank Kraushaar has been teaching classical Chinese poetry and prose literature (mostly from Wei-Jin to Song) since 1999. He prefers looking at literature in critical comparison with its translations, taking the latter as blueprint of social and individual dispositions retrieved by the original from its own future, which was unknown at the moment of its creation. His research activities cover Tang and Song poetry, chuan-qi novels, history and future of translation of Chinese verse in Western Languages (English, German, French, Latvian) as well as classical verse written by modern poets in the 20th and 21st century.
Frank has served as professor and in leading positions at the University of Latvia in Riga between 2005 and 2020. In autumn 2023 he will resume a permanent position at the Institute for Comparative Literature at Leopold-Franzens-Univerität Innsbruck, Austria.
Olga Lomová (Charles University)
Olga Lomová has a long teaching experience focusing on Chinese poetry (both pre-modern and 20th century), but she also taught classes on the impact of ideology on literature and culture in the People´s Republic of China. Her research includes Tang poetry, Six Dynasties poetry and prose, early Chinese historiography, particularly the work of Sima Qian, and intellectual and cultural transformation in China in early 20th century. Besides numerous research articles she published (in Czech) monographs on Wang Wei, Sima Qian, and co-authored a book on Wang Guowei’s Renjian cihua. Recently she wrote about the history of Czech sinology (Dvořák, Průšek) and about more general issues of the discipline.
Since 2002 Olga Lomová is director of the CCKF International Sinological Center at Charles University in Prague.
Michaela Pejčochová (National Gallery, Prague)
Michaela Pejčochová, curator of the Chinese art collections, National Gallery in Prague, got her PhD in Chinese studies from the Charles University in Prague and works as curator of the Chinese art collections at the National Gallery in Prague. She specialises in the history and theory of Chinese art and the research of Asian art collections in the West. She translated Guo Xi’s Lofty Message of Forests and Streams as part of her MA, and analysed Mi Fu’s and Dong Qichang’s art historical texts in her PhD thesis. In 2019, she published the Emissary from the Far East, a study about the painter and collector Vojtěch Chytil and the collection of Asian art he had once brought to Europe. Research summary: https://ngprague.academia.edu/MichaelaPejcochova
Tero Tähtinen (University of Tampere)
Tero Tähtinen (b. 1978) is a PhD candidate and lecturer of Comparative Literature in Tampere University, Finland. His up-coming dissertation “Empty Mountain, Empty Mind. The Relationship between Human and Nature and Classical Chinese Landscape Poetry” discusses the dynamics of human and non-human as they are thematized and presented in the context of traditional Chinese shanshui poetry.
Tähtinen has published two articles on classical Chinese poetics and the view on landscape in Finnish. His article “’In the Mountain Forest I Lose My Self’: The Experience of No-Self in Wang Wei’s Short Landscape Poems” was published by The Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture in 2022 and his article on space and place in Tao Qian’s tianyuan poetry will be published later on this year by The Journal of Chinese Humanities. In his research, Tähtinen applies theoretical tools of modern western literary studies to classical Chinese texts.
In addition, Tähtinen has translated a collection of classical Chinese nature poetry, Sunzi’s The Art of War, and several Chinese Chan Buddhist texts (including The Diamond Sutra, The Teachings of Master Bodhidharma and The Teachings of Master Huangbo) into Finnish.
Yang Zhiyi (楊治宜) (JWG University Frankfurt am Main)
She specializes in the research on classical and classicist Chinese poetry and investigates related questions in aesthetics, philosophy, memory, cultural studies, and literary modernity. She received a PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University in 2012 and is the author of a monograph on the 11th century poet Su Shi. She has been working on modern Chinese lyric classicism in the last few years and has published on poets like Liu Yazi, Wang Jingwei, Zhou Zuoren, and avant-garde classicist cyberspace poets. She considers herself Chinese and world citizen. It is the call of the distance–what the Germans beautifully describe as das Fernweh–which has brought her from China to the US and eventually to Germany. (For more information, see her personal webpage https://zhiyiyang.com/. )
The summer school is open to all interested students and scholars, upon sending the filled-in Prague Summer School 2023 – application form to lenka.chaloupkova@ff.cuni.cz. The tuition is free for all participants. Participants from Central and Eastern European institutions are eligible for a limited number of CCK-F travel and accommodation grants; to apply, specify the estimated ticket price and attach a short CV in your application.
Application deadline is June 15, 2023.
Update: The summer school is open to non-registered students up to the capacity of the room (C358).
