April 12-14, 2019

Workshop on the Grammar, Syntax and Rhetoric of the Zuozhuan

The “Workshop on the Grammar, Syntax and Rhetoric of the Zuozhuan” is led by Professor Christoph Harbsmeier. The workshop will be held the three days of Friday, April 12, Saturday, April 13, and Sunday, April 14, 2019 and will provide established scholars as well as advanced graduate students with an opportunity to enhance their knowledge of this foundational text that is also essential to understanding and contextualizing related archaeologically-recovered texts such as the Xinian 繫年. The workshop is also timely given the recent publication of a new, complete English-language translation of the Zuozhuan. Christoph Harbsmeier, Professor Emeritus at the University of Oslo (B.A. Merton College, Oxford 1969), is a distinguished expert in Chinese linguistics with profound specialist knowledge of ancient Chinese grammar, syntax and compositional strategies. The workshop will focus on a close reading of the Zuozhuan 左傳 with particular attention paid to the analysis of the literary and syntactical patterns of the text. The participants will be expected to be familiar with the first part of the text (Lord Yin 隱公) and to be prepared for detailed syntactical and semantic analysis of years 3-5 in particular. In addition to close reading and discussion, the participants of the workshop will be introduced to the most helpful tools necessary to the syntactical and semantic analysis of the text.

Co-Organizers:
Anne Kinney, University of Virginia
Christoph Harbsmeier, University of Oslo

Participating Scholars:

David Branner, Independent scholar
Constance Cook, Lehigh University
Benjamin Gallant, Harvard University
Piotr Gibas, College of Charleston
Paul Goldin, University of Pennsylvania
Jue Guo, Columbia University
Eric Henry, University of North Carolina
Chris Kim, Columbia University
Feng Li, Columbia University
Wai-yee Li, Harvard University
John Major, Independent scholar
Andrew Meyer, Brooklyn College
Maddalena Poli, University of Pennsylvania
Moss Roberts, NYU
Jeffrey Tharsen, University of Chicago
Jesse Watson, UC Berkeley
Boqun Zhou, University of Chicago