This is the first book to treat the intellectual developments that accompanied the Criticizing Lin Biao and Confucius Movement and the campaign against the Gang of Four, separating the political issues from the academic issues in both campaigns and reporting the genuine advances to come from the campaigns in archaeology, history, philosophy, sociology, and literature.Following a discussion of the Campaign Against Lin Biao Professor Wu treats those topics examined by Chinese scholars under its impetus: Slave Society in Ancient China, Historical (...) Critics and Criticisms of Confucius, Confucius and His Communist Critics, The Struggle Between the Confucian and Legalist Schools: From the Late Spring and Autumn Period to Quin, Criticism of Literature and the Arts: The "Shui-hu zhuan "Campaign, and then shows how in some cases the Criticisms of the Gang of Four further modified and corrected these areas of study. His carefully structured presentation and evaluation of this politically encouraged research makes clear the need for scholars to approach such polemics as they would any new data, for there were discoveries of enduring significance that resulted from both movements. Indeed, Professor Wu approaches this recent scholarship with such subtle discernment that his work approaches an intellectual history of China.Completing this remarkable volume are documentary notes and a Selected Bibliography, divided into nine parts that roughly follow the organization of the text, which together offer invaluable sources for further study and research.". (shrink)

The Zhuangzi is one of the richest early Chinese sources for exploring conceptualizations of the visceral human form. Zhuangzi presents the human frame as a corpus of flesh, organs, limbs, and bone; he dissects it before the reader's eyes, turning it inside out and joyfully displaying its fragmented joints, sundered limbs, and beautifully monstrous mutations. This body is a site of immolation and fragmentation that ultimately evokes a larger wholeness and completeness. Drawing and quartering the body, Zhuangzi paradoxically frees it (...) from ordinary mortality. -/- Sommer explores the fields of meaning of different terms for the human body found in the Zhuangzi: the body might appear there as a gong body 躬, a sanctimonious ritualized body; as a shen body 身, a site of familial and social personhood; or as a ti body 體, a complex, multilayered corpus of multiple parts, each of which is consubstantial with the whole. Most commonly, however, the body in the Zhuangzi is the xing 形, an elemental or structural form. Zhuangzi enlivens and develops the xing form in ways that are not seen in other early Chinese texts. He mutilates and mutates it such that boundaries between form and formlessness disappear, and the physical frame becomes incorporated into a larger common body that includes all of life and death. (shrink)