Martin Kern



			Martin Kern Professor of Chinese Literature Director of Graduate Studies Department of East Asian Studies 210 Jones Hall Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544 E-mail: mkern@princeton.edu Phone: (609) 258-5554 Fax: (609) 258-6984	Publications Curriculum Vitae Courses Taught E-Papers

Research

My work cuts across the fields of literature, philology, history, religion, and art in ancient and medieval China, with a primary focus on poetry.

Studying the composition, reception, and canonization of early texts, I am particularly interested in two questions: the performance of texts in political and religious ritual and their role in the formation of ancient and medieval Chinese cultural memory and identity. These issues lead into the complex problems of writing and orality and to the phenomenon of texts as material artifacts, especially with newly excavated manuscripts and inscriptions.

Another major field of my interest is in Chinese poetry, its theory, aesthetics, and hermeneutic practices. I am currently spending much of my time on the early history of the Classic of Poetry and the origin and early development of Chinese literary thought. Again, newly excavated manuscripts are of central importance to rethink the fundamentals of classical Chinese poetics.

And some day, I must escape for a while from early China to write a book on Du Fu’s poetry. In the end, that’s why I study classical Chinese.

Current Projects

“The Imperial Tradition of the Lost Original: Calligraphy and Personality in Wang Xizhi’s ‘Ritual to Pray for Good Harvest’.” Essay.
“Speaking of Poetry: Pattern, Argument, and Social Context in the Kongzi shilun.” Essay.
Poetry, Performance, and Cultural Memory in Early China. Monograph.
Cultivating Desire in Early and Medieval China: Poetry and the Quest for Stilling the Passions. Monograph.
History of Early Chinese Literature, 1200 B.C.-A.D. 9 . Leiden: Brill. Monograph.
The Book of Odes. Annotated translation and bilingual edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Teaching

In my undergraduate lecture course “Introduction to Chinese Literature” (EAS 232), we survey the foundations, major genres, and masterpieces of classical Chinese literature. A new lecture course I have helped to initiate is the sequence “East Asian Humanities” (HUM/EAS/COM 233-234) with faculty from four departments. I also teach upper-level undergraduate seminars on Chinese poetry as well as on early religious ritual and its texts and artifacts (EAS/REL 327).

On the graduate level, I teach seminars on Chinese poetry from Zhou through Tang and Song times, but also on literary thought, commentary, historiography, and issues of canonization and anthologizing in ancient and medieval Chinese literature. Current dissertation projects of my graduate students range from pre-imperial Chinese intellectual history to medieval Chinese poetry, the reception history of early texts, classical commentary, and commemorative inscriptions.


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Martin Kern

Publications

Curriculum Vitae

Courses Taught

E-Papers