Documentation and argument in Early China

Meyer, D. 2021. Documentation and argument in Early China: the Shàngshū 尚書 (Venerated Documents) and the Shū Traditions, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin & Boston.

 

Based on studying Qinghua manuscripts, Dirk proposes “the genre of Shu”. Shu is a tradition with a complicated process of generation during the Warring State period.

 

“By assimilating modes of communication through links with previous utterances of Shū traditions, the newly produced texts—Shū—thus enabled different actors to position themselves in the debate – in and through the voice of antiquity. Intertextuality is central to this. By making use of such consolidated text clusters in the traditions of Shū, the cultural capital of the Zhōu meaning community and their various sub-groups increasingly served as a conventionalised tool for the production, reception, and circulation of discourse. With such expectations of Shū genre solidifying across the different actors of the Eastern Zhōu oecumene, the said conventions stabilised even further, governing how a stretch of discourse was organised into text. New arguments, couched in the language of days yore, were thus introduced into the debate, with deemed-legitimate precedents from high antiquity. Shū genre thus became performative in the sense that a writing-supported text performance actualised cultural knowledge for ends in the present.” (p. 239)

 

Shu is performative with political relevance.

 

【该书解释“周武王有疾”时（p. 160 ff），发现，该文本不同于“金縢”，排除了后来的预设，而让读者重新体验一回周公当时的绝望时刻 (p.240)，最后才显示出来周公的忠诚。】