Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Circulation.

• Author: Raft, Zeb
• Position: Book review

Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Circulation. By ALEXANDER BEECROFT. New York: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2010. Pp. ix + 328. $85.00.

This book makes a contribution to the comparative study of Chinese poetics with its focus on "implied poetics," that is, on how ideas about poetry and its functions can be found outside of explicit treatises; and in its proposal, drawing from the work of Gregory Nagy, Sheldon Pollock, and others, of a grand framework of literary evolution, from localized beginnings (what the author calls "epichoric") to the organization of such local products into a "panchoric" interstate system in which performance played a key role, and then on into literature's "cosmopolitan" application in the age of empires and texts. This model is intriguing, but if broad periodizations are useful and even necessary, they tend to coexist uneasily with interpretation of individual texts. Here the Chinese cosmopolitan period in particular, said to stretch from the fourth century BCE to the Eastern Han (p. 206), is too broad for nuanced discussion.

The first chapter deals with Aristotle's Poetics, the Mao "Great Preface," and other works of "explicit poetics" from both traditions. Chapter two looks at epic through various "lives" of Homer, chapter three turns to how the history of Greek lyric genres was constructed in biographical anecdotes, and chapter four explores the tension between the aforementioned panchoric and epichoric in early Greece. This reviewer is not in a position to evaluate the Greek portions, but they are accessibly written and offer the China scholar a valuable glimpse of issues and scholarly debates in a parallel field.

The Chinese sections (chapters five through seven) suffer from flawed readings and questionable arguments. The first part of chapter five gives a good sense of the problems involved in the Mao commentary and also the interpretative creativity it gave rise to in later ages (pp. 179-86), but the second part (pp. 191-99) is based on the assumption that Zuozhuan quotations of single lines of Shying poems refer to the wholes of those poems. This is questionable--and one of the author's more general points, that poems were more malleable in the performance culture of the Eastern Zhou than the textual culture of the Han, would appear to suggest otherwise. There is also only a tenuous connection between the poems discussed in the first part of the chapter and the Zuozhuan...