Confronting the Past: Jin Shengtan's Commentaries on Du Fu's Poems.

This study aims to demonstrate a nuanced and complex version of Jin Shengtan's (1608-61) interpretation of Du Fu's (712-70) poetry and examine how he maneuvers the self into a dialogue with the hermeneutic past. As a well-known critic in the seventeenth-century China, Jin Shengtan distinguishes himself through his innovative reading strategies (especially application of the fenjie approach) as well as strong attack on a common claim in previous hermeneutics about inexplicable nature of Du Fu's poems. At the same time, however, the way Jin manifests such creativity often involves a seemingly self-effacing submission to certain canonical rules of reading Du Fu shaped by the earlier hermeneutics. To defend familiar canonical reading rules, Jin risks the very painful consequence of letting his self be engulfed in the past; but at the same time the dissociation of the self through his readiness toward 'obedience' to the past, paradoxically, powerfully reinforces the sense of self since in many cases he forces himself to be more creative in order to conform to these rules. Through successes and failures in his confrontation with the past, Jin celebrates a paradoxical self who is connecting and breaking with the past at the same time. Such hermeneutic phenomenon draws our attention to the function of hermeneutic continuity and helps us appreciate the dynamics under the surface of the historically constructed 'ahistoricity' of Du Fu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]