Craft of Oblivion

Albert Galvany Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU.

"…this book is pioneering in its research on the theme of oblivion." — Religious Studies Review"The papers in this volume examine memory—and forgetting—from an impressive variety of perspectives. In their different approaches and the sources they engage, the authors bring a new richness to the study of memory in premodern China. They show us that a sophisticated regarding of the past is not only the province of the modern but existed since antiquity in ways that can still surprise us." — Charles Sanft, author of Literate Community in Early Imperial China: The Northwestern Frontier in Han Times

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionAlbert GalvanyPART I. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL AND POLITICAL NARRATIVES 1. Cultural Amnesia and Commentarial Retrofitting: Interpreting the Spring and AutumnNewell Ann Van Auken2. Elision and Narration: Remembering and Forgetting in Some Recently Unearthed Historiographical ManuscriptsRens Krijgsman3. Shaping the Historian's Project: Language of Forgetting and Obliteration in the ShijiEsther Sunkyung Klein4. The Ice of Memory and the Fires of Forgetfulness: Traumatic Recollections in the Wu Yue ChunqiuOlivia MilburnPART II. PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS 5. The Daode jing's Forgotten Forebear: The Ancestral CultK. E. Brashier6. So Comfortable You'll Forget You're Wearing Them: Attention and Forgetting in the Zhuangzi and HuainanziFranklin Perkins7. The Practice of Erasing Traces in the HuainanziTobias Benedikt Zürn8. The Oblivious against the Doctor: Pathologies of Remembering and Virtues of Forgetting in the Liezi Albert Galvany9. Wang Bi and the Hermeneutics of ActualizationMercedes ValmisaPART III. RITUAL AND LITERARY TEXTS 10. Embodied Memory and Natural Forgetting in Early Chinese Ritual TheoryPaul Nicholas Vogt11. Exile and Return: Oblivion, Memory, and Nontragic Death in Tomb-Quelling Texts from the Eastern Han DynastyXiang Li12. Lost in Where We Are: Tao Yuanming on the Joys of Forgetting and the Worries of Being ForgottenMichael D. K. IngContributorsIndex