The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make
arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make
divergent arguments, the readability of the past then becomes an
issue. Therein lies the beginning of history, the sense of inquiry
that heightens our awareness of interpretation. How do interpretive
structures develop and disintegrate? What are the possibilities and
limits of historical knowledge?
This book explores these issues through a study of the
Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose
rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the
contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the
text's formation (ca. 4th c. B.C.E.). But in what sense is this
vast collection of narratives and speeches covering the period from
722 to 468 B.C.E. "historical"? If one can speak of an emergent
sense of history in this text, Wai-yee Li argues, it lies precisely
at the intersection of varying conceptions of interpretation and
rhetoric brought to bear on the past, within a larger context of
competing solutions to the instability and disintegration
represented through the events of the 255 years covered by the
Zuozhuan. Even as its accounts of proliferating disorder and
disintegration challenge the boundaries of readability, the
deliberations on the rules of reading in the Zuozhuan probe the
dimensions of historical self-consciousness.
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