Publications

2018

Chen JW. “On Mourning and Sincerity in the Li ji and the Shishuo xinyu.” In: Swartz W, Campany RF, editors. Memory in Medieval China: Text, Ritual, and Community. Leiden: Brill; 2018. pp. 63–81.
Chen JW. “Du Fu: The Poet as Historian.” In: Cai Z- qi, editor. How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Chinese Poetic Culture from Antiquity through the Tang. New York: Columbia University Press; 2018. pp. 236–47.

2017

2016

2014

Chen JW, Borovsky Z, Kawano Y, Chen R. “The Shishuo xinyu as Data Visualization.” Early Medieval China. 2014;20:22–58.

The following essay takes a macro-perspective on the Shishuo xinyu, reading it not in terms of anecdotal narrative or characterological analysis, but through questions of information management and computer-based visualization. We discuss the history of data visualization and seek to demonstrate the interpretive power (and limitations) that such computational methodologies bring to the study of premodern texts. In particular, we are concerned with the use of geographical information systems (GIS) and social network analysis, as well as with how these tools help us to visualize the complex data contained within the text. In many ways, this essay is intended as an introduction to certain aspects of the emerging field of digital humanities, one that simultaneously seeks to show how these new methodologies work within the disciplinary contexts of premodern Chinese cultural studies.

2013

Chen JW. “Knowing Men and Being Known: Gossip and Social Networks in the Shishuo xinyu.” In: Chen JW, Schaberg D, editors. ldle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Global, Area, and International Archive and University of California Press; 2013. pp. 55–70.
Chen JW. "Introduction". In: Chen JW, Schaberg D, editors. ldle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Global, Area, and International Archive and University of California Press; 2013. pp. 1–16.
Chen JW. “Sovereignty, Coinage, and Kinship in Early China.” positions: east asia critique. 2013;21(3):637–58.

This essay examines the discursive constellation of the concepts of sovereignty, coinage, and kinship from the Warring States Period to the first empires of the Qin and Han dynasties. Drawing upon philosophical texts, including the Lunyu, Mengzi, and Guanzi, as well as historical texts such as the Shang shu, Shi ji, and Han shu, I will argue that the foundational narrative for the emergence of coinage in China was inextricable from theories of both sagely and tyrannical sovereignties — an ideological ambivalence that was reflected in the discourse on coinage itself. The coin of the realm was the symbol of power and profit and thus of the political and the economic realities of empire. Yet imperial anxieties over political tyranny would lead classical political theorists to recode the minting of coin in terms of a moral discourse, one that was also instrumental in the moral legitimation of imperial sovereignty itself. This would be the discourse on kinship, which allowed theorists to equate the sovereign with the parent. Coinage, then, like sovereignty, would appeal to the language of kinship, and in this way would be translated from base tokens of material profit into symbols of the sovereign’s beneficent concern.