Lecture | China Seminar
Stories of Confucius
- Date
- Thursday 28 May 2026
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.16
Abstract
Stories about Confucius turn him into the symbol of cultural ideals and the engine of intellectual arguments and ideological debates. Confucius has become many different things to different people over the last twenty-five centuries. To focus on how his stories are told is to understand the history of ideas and socio-cultural history through his transformations. I will begin with Sima Qian's (c. 145-c. 87 BCE) account of the life of Confucius, which draws on almost four centuries of diverse lore produced by Warring States thinkers using Confucius as a pivot for generating new arguments. How does this canonical biography incorporate implicit debates between divergent positions and achieve unity and coherence? Why should we read each segment in this biography as the product and the generator of narratives and arguments? What do the elevation, co-optation, and excoriation of Confucius tell us about Chinese history?
Biography
Wai-yee Li is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. Her recent books include The Promise and Peril of Things: Literature and Culture in Late Imperial China (2022), The Peach Blossom Fan (2024), and The Confucius Chronicles (2026).