November 10th, 2022, 12:00 Noon Los Angeles
Zoom Webinar
Zoom Webinar
Event has been cancelled
Presented by Peter Kornicki
Cambridge University
Joined by Suyoung Son
Cornell University
For centuries the only books that circulated in East Asia were texts in literary Chinese travelling from China to peripheral states. In this lecture I will explore the reception of those texts in Japan, Korea and Vietnam and the efforts made to make them accessible to local readers. These operations conducted on literary Chinese texts were the first steps taken in vernacularization, and they later led to the production of vernacular translations and commentaries and ultimately to the dominance of vernacular texts. But Japan, Korea and Vietnam each chose different paths on the road to vernacularization and these differences defy easy explanation.