Sound and Sight: Poetry and Courtier Culture in the Yongming Era (483-493).

• Author: Wang, Ping
• Position: Book review

Sound and Sight: Poetry and Courtier Culture in the Yongming Era (483-493). By MEOW HUI GOH. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Pp. x + 192. $50.

Goh's book is a welcome contribution to the field of Chinese poetics in general and the study of the Yongming Triad (i.e., Shen Yue, Wang Rong, and Xie Tiao) in particular. With the author's poetic sensitivity to the words as well as the sound, this volume offers a fresh reading of several dozens of poems written around the turn of the sixth century. Joining recent English publications in the field of Southern Dynasties (420-589) literature and history, this book will further our understanding of the art of classical poetry in its (trans-)formative period and of the court culture that nurtured formal innovations--of which sound patterning came to be the most important yet least understood today. The title of the book "sound and sight" is a literal translation of shengse, a term that, as Goh rightly points out, has a string of negative connotations in the discourse of Chinese political history and literary criticism. The way this term is employed to evaluate Southern Dynasties poetry, such as in the oft-cited "shengse da kai" [sound and sight were completely unleashed], caricatures artistic embellishment and prosodic patterning as a dangerous beast that has to be bound and restrained. Regarded as playthings that appeal uninhibitedly to the five senses, writings of excessive shengse corrupt the hearing and thinking of its intended audience, usually the ruler. Such assessment of Southern Dynasties literature, "conflating literary criticism with moral judgment and political interpretation," has unfortunately persisted throughout much of history without serious challenges until recently. Goh's book is the first to delve into the technical matters of phonology in (re-)evaluating Yongming poetry. The central question that Goh poses in this volume is--what did shengse mean to those poets who supposedly instigated the poetic innovation in "sound and sight" during the Southern Dynasties? Challenging the simplified and sweeping judgment made against Southern Dynasties literature, Goh proposes to view poetic crafting, entailing keen observation of the phenomenal world, in light of these poets' identity or rather self-perception as courtiers within the cultural context of the second half of the fifth century. Goh argues that a "hybrid concept of personal worth" of the Yongming poets emerged out of a...