Wiebke Denecke
Harvard University, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Dissertation Title: "'Mastering' Chinese Philosophy: A History of the Genre of 'Masters Literature' [zhuzi baijia] from the Analects to the Han Feizi"

Wiebke's interests include cultural history, thought, and literature of premodern China and Japan, as well as Japanese appropriations of Chinese culture, and strategies of cross-cultural comparison. Her thesis is entitled "'Mastering' Chinese Philosophy: A History of the Genre of 'Masters Literature' [zhuzi baijia] from the Analects to the Han Feizi." It makes a case for reading what since China's encounter with the West has been considered "Chinese philosophy" instead as a textual genre of "Masters Literature" and analyzes its generic conventions and rhetorical strategies from the Confucian Analects through the Han Dynasty.

She is currently working on a book project with the preliminary title "Patterns of Literary History in Double-Faced Cultures: Versions from Early Japan and Ancient Rome." The project examines how early Japanese authors and how Latin authors conceived of their own literature and literary history in the presence of the overwhelming reference culture China, respectively Greece, and how they set out to tell their own story through and against the power of the reference culture's models of literary history. Wiebke is teaching an "Asian Humanities Colloquium" in the fall and "Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: China" in the spring semester.

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