The Craft of Oblivion is an innovative and groundbreaking volume that aims to study, for the first time, the intersections between forgetting and remembering in classical Chinese civilization. Oblivion has tended to be relegated to a marginal position, often conceived as the mere destructive or undesirable opposite of memory, even though it performs an essential function in our lives. Forgetting and memory, far from being autonomous and mutually exclusive spheres, should be seen as interdependent phenomena. Drawing on perspectives from history, philosophy, literature, and religion, and examining both transmitted texts and excavated materials, the contributors to this volume analyze various ways of understanding oblivion and its complex and fertile relations with memory in ancient China.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Albert Galvany
PART I. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL AND POLITICAL NARRATIVES
1. Cultural Amnesia and Commentarial Retrofitting: Interpreting the
Spring and Autumn
Newell Ann Van Auken
2. Elision and Narration: Remembering and Forgetting in Some Recently Unearthed Historiographical Manuscripts
Rens Krijgsman
3. Shaping the Historian’s Project: Language of Forgetting and Obliteration in the
Shiji
Esther Sunkyung Klein
4. The Ice of Memory and the Fires of Forgetfulness: Traumatic Recollections in the
Wu Yue Chunqiu
Olivia Milburn
PART II. PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS
5. The
Daode jing’s Forgotten Forebear: The Ancestral Cult
K. E. Brashier
6. So Comfortable You’ll Forget You’re Wearing Them: Attention and Forgetting in the
Zhuangzi and
Huainanzi
Franklin Perkins
7. The Practice of Erasing Traces in the
Huainanzi
Tobias Benedikt Zürn
8. The Oblivious against the Doctor: Pathologies of Remembering and Virtues of Forgetting in the
Liezi
Albert Galvany
9. Wang Bi and the Hermeneutics of Actualization
Mercedes Valmisa
PART III. RITUAL AND LITERARY TEXTS
10. Embodied Memory and Natural Forgetting in Early Chinese Ritual Theory
Paul Nicholas Vogt
11. Exile and Return: Oblivion, Memory, and Nontragic Death in Tomb-Quelling Texts from the Eastern Han Dynasty
Xiang Li
12. Lost in Where We Are: Tao Yuanming on the Joys of Forgetting and the Worries of Being Forgotten
Michael D. K. Ing
Contributors
Index
About the author
Albert Galvany Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU.
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