In the News

This talk will revisit the question of literary naturalness in Xie Lingyun’s poetic works from two vantage points. The first part examines the notion of ziran 自然 as it was applied to Xie by Southern Dynasties critics and demonstrates the need to historicize the term, whose significations shifted dramatically over time. The second part discusses Xie’s citations of the Yijing, or Classic of Changes, in his representative landscape works, including the “Fu on Dwelling in the Mountains.” Scholarship on Xie Lingyun up to now has rarely shown exclusive attention to Xie’s use of the Yijing, which in fact reveals much about the conceptual and structural framework of his mode of representation and about how he orders the world he sees. I will argue that Xie’s poetry exemplifies a literary naturalness that is informed by his reading of the Yijing, an important aspect largely ignored by scholars today.