Asian Studies Program, Classical Studies Program, Historical Studies Program, and Medieval Studies Program Present

“Working in the Office”: Bureaucracy, Community, and Poetry in Early Medieval China

Court officials in early medieval China conducted their “work” in and for the imperial bureaucracy: they drafted and revised documents in the office, traveled for business, inspected cities and frontiers, and managed lawsuits and infrastructure as local governors. While an empire always needs clerks and scribes for its operation and expansion, the early medieval period in Chinese history, spanning from the 3rd to the 7th centuries CE, saw the court elite’s increasing awareness of their work and themselves being working persons within the aristocratic political structure that determined the perimeter and limit of their social mobility. This is especially shown in poems composed by courtiers that describe their thoughts and feelings when they are fulfilling the duties required by their office, which this talk will focus on. These poems accent the poets’ longing for leisure, human connection, and camaraderie, as well as their confrontation with the faceless bureaucracy that separates them from, and unites them with, other members of the court community. Issues such as friendship, mobility, and value become contested in these texts. By investigating poetry on work and working in the office, this talk delineates a poetics of bureaucracy in early medieval China that centers around a dialectical relation between tong 通 and se 塞, connecting and blocking. This study shows that lyricism is co-constitutive with bureaucracy, as the former would not exist without the systematic control of aesthetic forms, bodies, and identifications, and the laboring persons’ coming to terms with these constraints. In the end, poetic representations of work do not lead to the imaginary of liberated selves that shun work but the formation of a community of working subjects who negotiate with their work and value prescribed by the imperial center and seek to find lyrical moments in the mundane.

---

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Olin 102

Subscribe: Save this Event: Subscribe / .ics File