Tian Named Professor Of East Asian Languages And Civilizations
Cambridge, Mass. - January 28, 2007 - Xiaofei Tian, a versatile scholar of Chinese literature and culture lauded for her mastery across a wide range of historical and artistic borders, has been appointed professor of East Asian languages and civilizations in Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, effective Jul. 1, 2006.
Tian, 35, was appointed to Harvard's department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations as a preceptor in Chinese in 2000 after serving as an assistant professor at Cornell University and visiting assistant professor at Colgate University.
"Professor Tian stands at the vanguard of Chinese literary studies," said Diana Sorensen, FAS dean for the humanities. "Her careful, brilliant studies of Chinese literature have both demythologized accepted monoliths and provided a new basis for reevaluating long-dismissed cultural treasures."
Before embarking on her academic career, Tian attained a high profile in Chinese communities while she was still in her teens for her dynamic writings in poetry and prose.
In her first academic book, Tao Yuanming (365-427) and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table (University of Washington Press, 2005), Tian undertook a revisionist contextualization of the most important reclusive poet in Chinese culture. In contrast to traditional interpretations of Tao's work that focused on the symmetry between his poetic style and life of self-imposed rural poverty, Tian deconstructs the poet's work and life to understand how the cultural icon was created. Through this study, Tian effectively showed how the fixed mythical figure of Tao was created over time in contradiction TO of the instability of the poet's actual collection of work, creating a canonical idealization at odds with the diversity of the poetry itself.
Tian's second book rehabilitated the more neglected literary culture of the Liang Dynasty. Dismissed by many scholars as frivolous work too obsessed with the sensuous and transient, Tian showed the creative energy at work in Liang poetry in Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (Harvard University Asia Center Press, forthcoming). Focusing her attention on Gongtishi or palace-style poetry, which depicts fleeting images and impressions of aristocratic life, Tian wrested the interpretation of these poems out of the hands of traditionalist critics who have viewed these works as signs of a dynasty in moral crisis.
Viewing the poems through the sociopolitical imbalance of the Liang Dynasty in addition to the growing influence of Buddhist thought during this period, Tian presented the verve of the Liang aesthetic in its penchant for things new and different as well as its preoccupation with a metaphysics characterized by the fleeting nature of life and the frailties of human attachment. Carefully eschewing an easy metaphysical ideology, Tian found an amplification of human and natural objects out of their original context hidden within these preoccupations.
Tian is currently working on three projects, the largest of which is a book which traverses historical periods and genres in examining the importance of vision and visuality in Chinese thought and culture from antiquity to the 18th century. She is also completing a chapter for The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) as well as a project on Chinese literary forgery and its cultural implications.
Tian received a B.A. in English from Beijing University in 1989; an M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln; and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard in 1998.
留言列表
