Zhaogu Search Ghosts

Author: Wang Yijia
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: The author takes Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio as the subject and engages in the work of "searching for ghosts," primarily based on the following two fundamental beliefs. First, I believe that many Ming and Qing dynasty anecdotal novels, including Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, are essentially rebellions and compensations by Chinese intellectuals against Confucianism. Second, I believe that Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, despite its high literary achievement, was not written to participate in literary competitions among scholars, but to "record strange phenomena." Pu Songling himself made it very clear: "I have a fondness for searching for spirits and enjoy hearing people talk about ghosts. Whenever I hear such tales, I put pen to paper and thus complete the chapters." These two fundamental beliefs have influenced my motivation for "searching for ghosts" and also determined the direction of my research. The Ming and Qing dynasty anecdotal novels, filled with "supernatural and chaotic elements," can be said to be a grand collection of the "dark souls" of the Chinese lower classes over five hundred years. They naturally became ideal materials for me to understand the minds of the Chinese people during that era, because the medicine I studied tells me that approaching problems from the "abnormal" and "dark" aspects is an effective way to "understand issues." The method I used is to deconstruct Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio as a "literary work" using "scientific knowledge" such as biology and psychology, attempting to find something meaningful from the gap between "scientific truth" and "literary imagination" in the process of observing the "past" from the "present" and analyzing the "local" with the "foreign."
The author takes Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio as the subject and engages in the work of "searching for ghosts," primarily based on the following two fundamental beliefs. First, I believe that many Ming and Qing dynasty anecdotal novels, including Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, are essentially rebellions and compensations by Chinese intellectuals against Confucianism. Second, I believe that Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, despite its high literary achievement, was not written to participate in literary competitions among scholars, but to "record strange phenomena." Pu Songling himself made it very clear: "I have a fondness for searching for spirits and enjoy hearing people talk about ghosts. Whenever I hear such tales, I put pen to paper and thus complete the chapters." These two fundamental beliefs have influenced my motivation for "searching for ghosts" and also determined the direction of my research. The Ming and Qing dynasty anecdotal novels, filled with "supernatural and chaotic elements," can be said to be a grand collection of the "dark souls" of the Chinese lower classes over five hundred years. They naturally became ideal materials for me to understand the minds of the Chinese people during that era, because the medicine I studied tells me that approaching problems from the "abnormal" and "dark" aspects is an effective way to "understand issues." The method I used is to deconstruct Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio as a "literary work" using "scientific knowledge" such as biology and psychology, attempting to find something meaningful from the gap between "scientific truth" and "literary imagination" in the process of observing the "past" from the "present" and analyzing the "local" with the "foreign."