The City and the Self: Crowds, Commodities, and Subjectivity in Eleventh-Century China

Although the literati of the eleventh century took the literature of the ninth century as the model for their compositions, they changed the geographic orientation of the genres they had inherited in order to create a place for the city in writing. As they opened up urban streets to view, they reflected on their encounters with anonymous crowds and on their relationship with commodities, trying to perceive themselves as others might perceive them, and assessing their value and their price. By the end of the eleventh century, they grew alarmed by the relative value this consideration attached to the newly discovered self, and either sought mastery of the crowd and commodities by supreme concentration of their mental powers or withdrew from the city to perceive the absolute value of the self in the undisturbed quiet of a rural estate.

Dans le cadre du séminaire de Christian Lamouroux, « Lettrés, financiers et militaires - les monnaies des Généralités dans la Chine des XIIe et XIIIe siècles »