Bodies in (E)motion: Decoding Chinese Writing in the Interplay between Embodied Experience and Technics Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Hou, Dongchen Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 10/10/2021 07:13:37 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/627737 BODIES IN (E)MOTION: DECODING CHINESE WRITING IN THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN EMBODIED EXPERIENCE AND TECHNICS by Dongchen Hou __________________________ Copyright © Dongchen Hou A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2018 THE UNIVERSITY OF ~i\RIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Dongchen Hou, titled Bodies in (E)motion: Decoding Chinese Writing in the Intewlay between Embodied Experience and Technics" and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ;(~~ Date: 4/23/2018 Hai Ren Date: 4/23/2018 David Gramling 6 Date: 4/23/2018 Fabio Lanza Date: 4/23/2018 Wenhao Diao Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. Date: 4/23/2018 Dissertation Director: Hai Ren 2 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Dongchen Hou 3 AKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this dissertation, though it falls under one author’s title, is in fact a collaborative work with support from many channels. First, I want to give my sincere thanks to my academic advisor, Professor Hai Ren, for his support and guidance during the tenure of my Ph.D. study at the University of Arizona. The course I took with him three years ago, Digital Humanities in Asia, inspired me to build new perspectives through interdisciplinary conversations and think about what “writing” is. Hai generously provided invaluable suggestions on my academic development and directed my pursuits along the way. I also want to thank my three committee members. Wenhao introduced me to Inoue’s article on Japanese stenography, which inspired much of my research on Chinese stenography and eventually became one chapter in this dissertation. She generously spared her time during her maternity leave amongst many other work and life tasks to provide detailed suggestions on chapters’ ideas and structures. Fabio gave invaluable support with insightful comments on this work; in addition, the ideas, methodologies, and perspectives of thinking from the discussions in his class became a treasure that continually nourishes my research. I want to thank David for soliciting my dissertation draft very early, forcing me to edit my writing on a timely manner. He inspired me to rethink this project from a translational and translingual perspective. I have greatly benefited from numerous “anonymous” readers of my dissertation drafts at different stages from the Writing Skills Improvement Program at the University of Arizona. I have participated in writing groups for two years, and I want to especially thank two writing group facilitators: Jen Glass and Leslie Dupont. As a non-native English speaker and writer, I struggled to write this colossal work. Jen, a grammar “nerd” as she calls herself, significantly helped me and improved my academic English writing skill. Leslie helped me unpack ideas and 4 terms, clean grammatical errors, and brainstorm for new ideas. My writing group members, though coming from different academic backgrounds, provided invaluable suggestions on how to tell my story to general audiences. Sara shared with me the case of Chinese Classroom Experiment and suggested me to compare with Xu Bing’s artificial writing. Tola pushed me to think about authorship and co-authorship in human-machine interactions. There are many more peers that I can never thank enough. Without you, I could not have finished this work. Outside the circle of academic faculty at the University of Arizona, I significantly benefited from workshops and conference presentations. The Mellon Chinese calligraphy workshop held at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was a precious opportunity to learn and polish calligraphy connoisseurship under the guidance of Professor Harrist and Professor Hui-wen Lu. The art history knowledge I have possessed from the five-day workshop lays the foundation for my discussion of Chinese writing. The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) regional conferences and Berkeley-Stanford Graduate Student conference provided small, yet supporting space for students like me to share my dissertation with other scholars and graduate students. I also want to thank Professor Lisa Claypool from the University of Alberta for her inspiration on my proposed panel titled “Revisiting the Boundary: The Interplay between Art and Technology in East Asia.” Though the panel did not make its way to AAS annual conference 2018, Professor Claypool’s warm and supportive attitude and valuable comments on this topic is a great resource of inspiration for my dissertation. I want to thank the Confluencenter graduate fellowship and College of Humanities graduate student research grant at the University of Arizona for their generous support for this research. I also want to thank staffs from various archives, including Shanghai Municipal Archive in Shanghai, The First Historical Archive of China in Beijing and The Second Historical 5 Archive of China in Nanjing, for their help during my stay. The archival materials I collected from these locations are strong evidences supporting the argument in this dissertation. In addition, I want to thank Professor Zhang Qiang from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute for providing me with invaluable material and idea on modern calligraphy’s new manifestation. Though this part did not eventually make it to the final version of the dissertation, it is a continuous inspirational resource for my future work on Chinese calligraphy. I also thank Professor Li Jun from Southeast University for giving me the opportunity to visit his lab on calligraphy robots. As the first people from the discipline of humanities with no network in the field of engineers, I am deeply touched by the unconditioned help from scholars like Professor Li Jun. This dissertation is not possible without my fellow classmates, friends, and colleagues in the Department of East Asian Studies. I benefit significantly from academic discussions, informal chat, advice and comments, and delicious home-cooking meals with my friends in the department. I want to thank my dear friends Xuefei Ma, Fengyuan Yu (Alice), Lu Zhang, Yu Tian, Yi Wang, Xin He, Yilan Liu, Xiaowen Nie, and Shiho Yamamoto. The long journey of this dissertation felt much shorter with your support. Lastly, I want to thank my parents, Zonghua Hou and Bingfei Du, for their unwavering love, support, and understanding to my academic pursuit. I thank my fiancé, Lee Spitzley for the inspirational chats on information theory (which is very relevant to this dissertation!), his help with my dissertation editing, delicious home-made meals, and being my closest companion. In the process of this dissertation, one of my most important family members, my grandfather, passed away. In retrospect, I am so grateful to have him as my strong mental support. He showed unconditioned love and understanding when I decided to pursue my study in the United States six years ago. I dedicate this work to my grandfather. 6 Table of Contents ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................. 9 Introduction: (De)Marginalizing Writing .................................................................................. 11 Bodies in (E)motion: Writing as Embodied Experience ...................................................................... 18 Bodies in E-Motion: Writing as Technics........................................................................................... 23 Labor and Authorship Production ...................................................................................................... 28 Dissertation Chapter Outline .............................................................................................................. 37 Chapter 1: Shifting from the Eye to the Ear: The Disappearance of Stenographers and the Coming of China’s Modernization, 1890s ................................................................................