"In this book, Xin Conan-Wu presents a radically revisionist argument on Zhu Xi's (1130-1200) Neo-Confucian philosophy of education. Via analysis of unfamiliar landscapes and the poems of the White-Deer Grotto Academy, Yuelu Academy, and Wuyi Retreat, Conan-Wu argues that when praxis speaks for orthodoxy, the eclipsed pedagogue casts a liberal light on the enshrined philosopher. Neo-Confucian senses of the gaze and place engendered Zhu Xi's natural pedagogy and mapped the environment of his academies. Conan-Wu cross-examines the textual traces and their innate vision, the physical sites and their transhistorical milieu, the Eight Views and Nine Bends and their afterlives in China and Korea. It unfurls an academy education, mutually reinforced by classical learning and self-cultivation, and sustained by a lure of the Supreme Joy of Confucian sagehood"--
In this book, Xin Conan-Wu presents a radically revisionist analysis on Zhu Xi’s (1130–1200) Neo-Confucian philosophy of education. She argues that landscape and poems in twelfth-century academies bespeak his natural pedagogy and reveal unsuspected contributions to Chinese cultural sensibility by this emblematic figure of a stultifying orthodoxy.
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Prologue: Zhu Xi in His Time
1The Changing World of the Educated Elite and Their Anxieties
2Zhu Xi (11301200)
Part 1: Visuality and the Academy
1 An Archaeology of Visualities
1The Regime of the Classical Gaze
2Buddhism and Visualization
3Visuality in Landscape Poetry
4Xie Lingyun (385433)
5Wang Wei (ca. 699761) and the Tang Poets
6Synopsis
2 Learning and Visuality at White-Deer Grotto
1The Restoration
2Zhu Xi on Learning
3The Gaze that Probes the Principle
4A Neo-Confucian Inquiry of Visual Experience
Part 2: Spatiality and the Academy
3 An Archaeology of Spatialities
1Patterns of Spatiality since Antiquity
2Spatialities of Emptiness
3The Eight Views of Xiaoxiang
4Synopsis
4 The Ten Scenes of Yuelu [ Academy]
1The Meeting of Zhu-Zhang and Song Scholars Gardens
2A Philosophical Path between Mountain and Water
3A Field of Confucian Wisdom
4An Interpretation of the Agency of Place
Part 3: Place-Making and Pedagogy
5 Environment and Pedagogical Practices
1The Site: External Appearance versus Inner Activities
2The Supreme Joy amid Mountain-and-Water
3The Environment as Pedagogical Apparatus
6 Singing along the Nine-Bend Stream
1Wuyi Retreat and the Boat Songs
2The Afterlife of the Nine Bends
3An Art of Place-Making
7 The Eight Views Revisited
1The Gazetteers of Yuelu
2Eight Views of the Academy
3A Genealogy of the Pedagogy
8 Epilogue
1Zhu Xis Natural Pedagogy
2Neo-Confucian Contributions to Changes in Cultural Sensibilities
3The Pervasive Role of Emotions
List of Characters
Bibliography
Index
Xin Conan-Wu (), Ph.D. (2008), University of Bristol, is Margaret Hamilton Associate Professor of Art History at William & Mary. She has published English and Chinese monographs, articles and edited volumes on landscape in ancient China and the contemporary world, including Garden Art in A Companion to Chinese Art (Wiley, 2015).
