The Institute for Chinese Studies
and The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Professor Li Yu
"Women's Reading in Late Imperial China"
Wednesday, May 303:30 ~ Mendenhall Lab 115
View flyer [PDF]
Summary of Talk:
Li Yu is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture in the Department of Asian Studies at Williams College. She received her doctorate in the field of Chinese Language Pedagogy and Cultural History from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University in 2003. Her dissertation A History of Reading in Late Imperial China 1000-1800 was the only winner in a national competition for the prestigious Council of Graduate School/UMI Distinguished Dissertation Award in the field of Humanities and Fine Arts for 2002 and 2003. Professor Yu’s current research projects continue to reflect her interests in both history and pedagogy of reading: one project explores the reading world of Ming Qing women through their poems and essays, and the other is focused on a pedagogical model of developing learners’ reading proficiency in Chinese from novice to advanced level.
Women’s Reading in Late Imperial China
The separation of the sexes that became highly institutionalized during the late imperial China meant different educational standards for men and women, which in turn entailed different expectations of the social uses of literacy for female readers. Thus, male literati’s depiction of a female reader typically either eroticized or highlighted the moral rectitude associated with her act of reading. Women’s own writings, however, revealed a subtly different reading world. Reading brought both pleasures and perils for many female readers who were constrained by their physical surroundings and by the ideology of their time. Their poems and essays provided us with not only key information concerning the circumstances of their reading activities, but also their self-image as readers and their unique conception of the term dushu (reading/learning). Through a close reading of women’s poems, my research examines the reading activities of several historical female readers/writers of the Jiangnan area, and investigates how the act of reading played a critical role in elite women’s daily life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[PDF] - Some links on this page are to .pdf files. These are designated by [PDF] following the link. PDF files require the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader software to open them. If you do not have Reader, you may use the following link to Adobe to download it for free at: Adobe Acrobat Reader
