The Story of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism in Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and The Journey to the West

by Jing Wang

In this pathbreaking study of three of the most familiar texts in the Chinese tradition—all concerning stones endowed with magical properties—Jing Wang develops a monumental reconstruction of ancient Chinese stone lore. Wang’s thorough and systematic comparison of these classic works illuminates the various tellings of the stone story and provides new insight into major topics in traditional Chinese literature.
Bringing together Chinese myth, religion, folklore, art, and literature, this book is the first in any language to amass the sources of stone myth and stone lore in Chinese culture. Uniting classical Chinese studies with contemporary Western theoretical concerns, Wang examines these stone narratives by analyzing intertextuality within Chinese traditions. She offers revelatory interpretations to long-standing critical issues, such as the paradoxical character of the monkey in The Journey to the West , the circularity of narrative logic in The Dream of the Red Chamber , and the structural necessity of the stone tablet in Water Margin.
By both challenging and incorporating traditional sinological scholarship, Wang’s The Story of Stone reveals the ideological ramifications of these three literary works on Chinese cultural history and makes the past relevant to contemporary intellectual discourse. Specialists in Chinese literature and culture, comparative literature, literary theory, and religious studies will find much of interest in this outstanding work, which is sure to become a standard reference on the subject.

359 pages, Paperback

First published December 23, 1991

About the author

Jing Wang is Professor of Chinese media and Cultural Studies and S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Language & Culture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is jointly appointed to MIT's Comparative Media Studies and Global Studies & Languages.

Jing Wang is the founder and organizer of MIT’s New Media Action Lab. In spring 2009, Professor Wang launched an NGO2.0 in collaboration with four Chinese universities including the University of Science and Technology of China, two Chinese NGOs, and corporate partners including Ogilvy & Mather China and Milward Brown. The project, funded by Ford Foundation in Beijing, is designed to enhance the digital and new media literacy of grassroots NGOs in the underdeveloped regions of China and deliver an interactive mapping platform built on Ushihidi, complete with Web 2.0 training courses and a Chinese field guide to best practices and software of social media for nonprofits.

Professor Wang started working with Creative Commons in 2006 and serves as the Chair of the International Advisory Board of Creative Commons Mainland China. She was appointed to serve on the Advisory Board for Wikimedia Foundation in 2010. She serves on the editorial and advisory boards of ten academic journals in the US, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the UK, which include journals such as Global Media and Communication; Advertising & Society Review; positions: east Asia cultures critique; Chinese Journal of Communication; Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal: Movements; The Chinese Journal of Communication and Society, etc.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[sohu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Efusivamente recomendable a calquera persoa interesada en China, mesmo para que non está tan fascinado pola súa literatura clásica —engadiría, incluso, que é un exemplo impecable de lectura intertextual para calquera interesado nos estudos literarios.

A idea de facer unha historia folclóricas das pedras na literatura chinesa pode ser lido, superficialmente, como unha absoluta frikada. Ao inicio estaba escéptico de que isto fora ser pouco máis que estes ensaios da academia que desenvolven de forma demasiado extensiva un aspecto anecdótico e non particularmente moi interesante dunha obra, pero é todo o contrario. É un exercicio moito máis de synechdoque, a capacidade que ten a pedra na cultura chinesa de presentar tal variedade de significados e participacións en rituais que podes, dende ese elemento tan sinxelo e ordinario, extraer toda unha cosmovisión super expansiva da súa literatura. Como os mellores ensaios literarios tan concretos, acaba sendo abraiante no seu analise linguístico, socio-histórico, político e, obviamente, literario. Non é tanto un estudo da repetición dun signo, senón de como a repetición dun signo en contextos distintos amplía as súas capacidades de lectura e complexidade de comprensión e como, unha cultura case sen decatarse, amplía, distorsiona e evoluciona na súa construción simbólica.