Abstract:

Those who admire Qian Zhongshu’s works as the “cultural Everest” are amazed by the unique richness of his writing style, which stands unparalleled in the modern era. This paper proposes a four-step roadmap for “tasting”. The first step is to define the “richness” of Qian’s scholarship as the embodiment of his ideal personality as heroic sage in his texts. Generally speaking, scholarly writing should not only adhere to but also dare to break common framework so as to create a “beauty of extraordinariness”. The second step is to highlight that Qian’s scholarship is characterized by a composite role, maintaining his position as a critic with a focus on “concrete literary appreciation and judgment” while also venturing as an esthetician of the second type into the history of literary art and theory with his deep study of the beauty of literature. The third step is to distinguish between the “role, ” which denotes a scholar’s academic identity, and his “expertise, ” which refers to his professional reliance and execution of the role. This drives Qian to seamlessly incorporate extensive empirical research (“my annotating the Six Classics”) into a subtle framework of his theoretical discoveries and historical models (“the Six Classics’ annotating me”). The fourth step is to point out that, in terms of historical theory, the “richness” of Qian’s scholarship is best exemplified by Selected Annotations of Song Poetry. This is not easily discernible by all scholars; it can only be truly appreciated or “tasted” by those with rare insights. Scholars, including Wang Shuizhao, can perceive or taste the “richness” of Qian’s scholarship from a “zooming” perspective, while scholars, including Zheng Chaozong, fail to do so from the commonly prevalent “one-dimensional” perspective.

Key words: Qian Zhongshu’s scholarship, tasting, role, expertise, writing intention, Qian Zhongshu