The Book of Poetry: The Han Canonization - Dead Deer Meat as a Gift

This episode looks at the concerted effort by three prominent Han commentators to allegorize a poem made up of disjointed or rather conflicting parts. It also reflects on the ironic fact that Han commentators’ allegorizing process itself constitutes a beautiful exercise of literary imagination, foreshadowing the fruitful exploitation of semantic, syntactic, and structural ambiguities by Du Fu, Li Shangyin, and other Tang poets. Host: Zong-qi Cai, Lingnan University of Hong Kong; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign