Toward an Extraordinary Everyday: Li Yu’s (1611-1680) Vision, Writing, and Practice Sarah E. Kile Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Sarah E. Kile All rights reserved ABSTRACT Toward an Extraordinary Everyday: Li Yu’s (1611-1680) Vision, Writing, and Practice Sarah E. Kile This dissertation considers how the literatus entrepreneur Li Yu (1610-1680) took advantage of the burgeoning market economy of early Qing China to engineer and market a new experience of the everyday. The world in which Li Yu’s cultural products were best sellers was rife with novelty. The Ming dynasty had collapsed in 1644, yet many of its defining features remained: urban centers brimmed with gadgets, both Chinese and foreign, that offered new possibilities for engaging the material world. The status of writing and the reading public was also changing, as more books were published at lower costs than ever before. Li Yu capitalized on this ripe moment to develop and sell cultural products that directed the focus of consumers to the details and possibilities of their everyday. I argue that through his cultural production, Li Yu changed what constituted cultural capital and who had rights to it in the urban centers of southern China in the early Qing. Li Yu made a brand of his name, which he used to market his fiction and drama as well as intangible products like innovative designs and do-it-yourself technologies. I examine the strategies that traverse the range of his cultural production to demonstrate how he altered the physical makeup of the built environment and the visual experience of theatrical performance, while also revising the ways that they could be represented in language and depicted in narrative. Readers of Li Yu’s writing, visitors to his gardens, and audiences for his theatrical productions could expect to encounter particulars: his language zooms in on the material world, narrating the gritty specifics of genitals and dirt; he waxes technical about his rigged stage lighting and dioramic windows. In one of his stories, a man uses a telescope to impersonate a god; in another a wily thief cannot “see” a woman’s myopia, and so misjudges her. At the heart of this study is Li Yu’s magnum opus, Leisure Notes (Xianqing ouji), a curious collection of several hundred essays on topics that range from theater direction to heating, choosing a concubine to balustrade design, the art of walking to pomegranate trees. This text has some commonalities with late-Ming manuals of taste, which documented the fine points of distinction around which people negotiated their status vis-à-vis conspicuous consumption of luxury commodities. In the late Ming, these markers of social distinction were hotly debated as merchants challenged literati claims to rights over cultural capital. I show how Li Yu departs from late-Ming discourse by rejecting luxury commodities to locate discernment instead in readers who join him in experimenting with his reproducible designs and technological improvements in the spaces of their everyday lives. I contend that these experiments reveal the limitations of grand narratives of the day—such as Confucian morality, gender norms, fate, and medicine—by exploiting their contingencies, and by elevating the status of individual experience. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………………...iii Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………1 1. Between Writing and Practice…………………………………………………………………………..34 2. Experimenting in Print………………………………………………………………………………….88 3. Crafting Everyday Social Spaces……………………………………………………………………...129 4. Lights, Vision, Action…………………………………………………………………………………169 5. The Body Offstage…………………………………………………………………………………….210 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………...263 Appendices……………………………………………………………………………………………….277 i LIST OF FIGURES 1. Page from the table of contents of Li Yu’s A First Levy of Letters…………………………116 2. Excerpt from the editorial note to A First Levy of Letters……………………………………118 3. Woodblock illustration of Li Yu’s fan-shaped window on a pleasure boat…………………………..207 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project has been possible, exhilarating, and deeply pleasurable, because of the engagement and encouragement of many thoughtful and generous people. In addition, a number of institutions provided crucial financial support for the training, research, and writing of this dissertation. The following is my attempt to express my gratitude to these individuals and institutions. This dissertation was conceived and developed in conversation with my advisers, Shang Wei and Dorothy Ko. Their guidance, criticism, and enthusiasm have guided my intellectual trajectory from the very first days of my graduate program to the final pages of this dissertation, and I am honored and humbled to have learned from them. Shang Wei’s influence on my work is immeasurable. The breadth of his knowledge, the pleasure he finds in literary texts and passes on to his students, and the creativity with which he examines cultural phenomena have left deep impressions on me. His insights, shared through hour upon hour of stimulating conversation, have influenced every step and chapter of this project. Dorothy Ko’s uncanny ability to always ask questions that both challenge and open up the topic at hand has had a profound influence on the shape of my work. Her confidence in some of my fledgling ideas and her ability to articulate those ideas for me when they seemed to me a jumble on the page taught me about the collaborative nature of thinking and writing, and reshaped the content I saw before me until it become more than just that jumble. I could not have asked for more generous, supportive, and engaged advisers. I would like to thank the members of my committee – my advisers, Weihong Bao, Lydia Liu, and Sophie Volpp – for their careful reading of this dissertation in the middle of summer and for a conversation at the defense that helped me envision what this project will look like as a iii book. The comments and critiques they offered have provided multiple new perspectives from which to think about this project, and I cannot thank them enough for their generosity. It was through conversations with Weihong Bao that I engaged with visual culture and film theory and thought about how to discuss visual experience in early modern. Conversations and courses with Lydia Liu over the years have continually challenged me to think carefully about the relationship between economic exchange, technology, and textuality. Sophie Volpp’s work on theatricality, performance, and sexuality has had a great influence on me, and a paper she gave at Columbia on Li Yu’s telescope during my early days as a graduate student helped me see possibilities for combining literary analysis with the study of material culture. While at Columbia I had the pleasure of learning from many other faculty members as well. Eugenia Lean generously read drafts of various writing projects over the years and her questions and suggestions have been formative. She and Chris Rea also invited me to participate in a workshop on cultural entrepreneurship in the modern period, “Circuits of Exchange,” and conversations at that workshop helped shape this project at its earliest stage. Wendy Swartz, over three semesters of coursework, taught me to read poetry, a skill that has proved invaluable, in research and in writing. Chun-fang Yu taught me to read sutras and early Buddhist literature, which has informed my understanding of Buddhist references in all my reading for this project. Jonathan Hay, at New York University, taught me to appreciate the specificity of material details in Xianqing ouji, and how to evaluate visual and material culture in general. Early coursework with Jenny Davidson got me thinking about the relationship between literature and the category of “culture” in different times and places. My analysis of gender and women benefitted greatly from conversations and workshops with faculty and graduate students at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, for which I thank in particular Sharon Marcus, Lila iv Abu-Lughod, and Marianne Hirsch. Throughout my time at Columbia, Bob Hymes has been a constant source of encouragement, good humor, and intellectual stimulation. Steve Mintz, in the course of his seminars on teaching and the job search, taught me invaluable lessons about writing as well. At the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Chengzhi Wang, Rich Jandovitz, Ken Harlin, and Rongxiang Zhang made the library feel like home (right up until closing time). Tamara Kachanov, Petya DeVallance, and Tracy Howard were crucial sources of support and encouragement, especially during my final year. Conversations with scholars at other institutions has had a significant impact on parts of this dissertation as well. I would like to thank Kate Swatek, Judith Zeitlin, and Xu Peng for the conversations at AAS in Honolulu about Kunqu performance; Pat Sieber and David Rolston for the conversations the social circulation of Qing drama at AAP in Chicago; Wai-yee Li, Shang Wei, and Ellen Widmer at the New England AAS conference for our conversation about Qing garden culture; Tobie Meyer-Fong for her comments at AAS in Toronto on commerce and social networks; and Paize Keulemans for the impromptu conversations on my Li Yu (and his Li Yu) inside and outside Starr Library. I am grateful to Zhang Hongsheng for hosting me in Nanjing University’s Chinese department during the academic year 2009-2010. Without his support and generosity, I would not have learned a fraction of what I did. He welcomed me into his cohort of graduate students and introduced me to many of his colleagues, transforming Nanjing into my home away from home. Cao Mingsheng hosted me in Yangzhou and introduced me to Huang Qiang, who has been compiling information about Li Yu’s social connections for decades. Yu Weiming allowed me to audit his class, and was always available to chat about the history of drama.