LESSON 1: CHINESE LITERATURE

Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism

CHINESE LIT is profoundly influenced by three great school of thoughts:

LAO TZU

Philosopher and writer. He is the founder of philosophical Taoism, and a deity in religious Taoism and traditional Chinese religions.

Classical, Modern, Contemporary, Present Age

Types of Chinese Lit: (4)

CONFUCIUS

Philosopher, politician, and teacher whose message of knowledge, benevolence, loyalty, and virtue were the main guiding philosophy of China for thousands of years.

LI PO

Chinese poet, acclaimed from his own time to the present as a brilliant and romantic figure who took traditional poetic forms to new heights.

Po Chu I

Chinese poet best known for his ballads and satirical poems.

Po Chu I

He held the view that good poetry should be readily understood by the common people and exemplified it in poems noted for simple diction, natural style, and social content.

Tu Fu

Chinese poet and politician of the Tang dynasty. Along with his elder contemporary and friend Li Bai, he is frequently called the greatest of the Chinese poets.

Poetry, prose, novels, drama and opera

Forms of CHINESE LIT: (4)

Poetry

__ is one of the earliest artistic forms as well as the most fully developed in China.

Classical

__ poetry cares a great deal for rhythm.

Tang Dynasty

__ is the period when poetry was flourishing, (the golden age of poetry)

2,300 poets, 50,000 poems

Data of Tang Dynasty

Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi

Famous people from Tang Dynasty (3)

5 and 7 characters

Ancient poetry of the Tang Dynasty are mainly composed of _ and _.

Quatrains, Verses

The modern style poetry in Tang Poetry are also composed of two parts: _ and _.

SONG CI

is a type of lyric poetry

CI

It uses a set of poetic meters derived from a base set of certain patterns, in fixed - rhythm, fixed -tone, and variable line - length formal types.

CI

It is one (out of five) of the basic poetic genres recognized before the influence of Western culture.

SHI

GENRE: poetry, verse

YUEFU

GENRE: Music bureau verse

FU

GENRE: rhapsody, rhymed prose

QU

GENRE: aria

6th to the 3rd century BC

When did the first great works of Chinese philosophy appear?

Confucius’ Analects, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

What philosophical writings (prose) appeared? (2)

Five classics (wu jing), four books (si shu)

Data of confucianism

Book of Odes, Book of Documents, Book of Changes, Book of Rites, and the Spring and Autumn Annals.

Five classics of confucianism

Doctrine of the Mean, the Great Learning, Mencius, and the Analects

Four books of confucianism

San qu, za ju

Yuan Qu includes what dramas?

San qu

is lyrics written to fit a different melodies

ZA JU

mainly consisted of a prelude and the main story, composed of four acts, which were well coordinated

PEKING OPERA

This opera was extremely popular in the Qing Dynasty court.

PEKING OPERA

It uses a combination of stylized actions like singing, dancing, dialogue and acrobatic fighting to tell a story or present different characters and their happiness, anger, sorrow, surprise, fear and sadness.

Journey to the West (Wu Cheng’en)
Dream on Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin)
Romance of Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong)
Water Margin (Shi Naian)

Four great classical novels:

Campus literature, online literature, translation

Chinese LIT today: (3)