Comparative poetics research repository connecting Western literary theory (via UC Berkeley Classics 124, G.R.F. Ferrari, Spring 2016) to the Ming-Qing Chinese commentarial tradition, centered on Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅) and Zhang Zhupo's 1695 commentary.
Course reference: https://dagrs.berkeley.edu/courses/spring-2016
Defenses of transgressive representation — in Western poetics (Plato's expulsion of the poets, Aristotle's catharsis, Longinus's sublime, Sidney's Apology) and in the Jin Ping Mei commentarial tradition alike — consistently locate their justification in an external interpretive frame. That frame does not merely describe the moral and gender categories it invokes; it produces them. This repository traces that pattern across two traditions that rarely get read together, and treats Judith Butler's account of performativity as a shared analytic lens for both.
unit-notes/— reading notes on the core Western poetics figures (Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Sidney, and the neoclassical reception).western-poetics-synthesis.md— cross-cutting synthesis of the Western unit, isolating the "external frame" move each figure makes.jin-ping-mei/— three comparative files on the Chinese-language side: Zhang Zhupo's commentary against the Chongzhen commentator, Naifei Ding's Obscene Things as the dominant English-language reading, and the textual crux in David Roy's Princeton translation.butler-gender-trouble-foundation.md— theoretical foundation file on performativity, used as the connective tissue between both traditions.adjacent-scholarship/— related work extending the project's "external frame" thesis beyond its two main traditions (currently: Xiaofei Tian on letters and gift-giving in early medieval China).cross-synthesis.md— the full comparative argument, Western poetics ↔ Ming-Qing commentary ↔ performativity.benchmark-design.md— design notes for a recension-aware LLM benchmark (see below).scripts/pdf_metadata_extractor.py— utility for extracting citation metadata from PDF sources into CSL-JSON for Zotero import.
Jin Ping Mei survives in two major textual traditions:
- Recension A (詞話本 / cihua, 1610) — the version underlying David Roy's five-volume Princeton translation.
- Recension B (繡像本 / xiuxiang, illustrated edition) — the version Zhang Zhupo actually annotated in 1695.
Because Roy's translation is keyed to Recension A while Zhang Zhupo's commentary was written against Recension B, any reading that layers Zhang's interpretive apparatus directly onto Roy's English text is importing a commentarial frame onto a textual base it was never written for. This is a real and easy-to-miss error — one that current LLMs, trained on a flattened, undifferentiated mass of secondary discussion, are especially prone to reproduce uncritically.
This repository underpins a proposed recension-aware benchmark (see benchmark-design.md) measuring whether an LLM can:
- Correctly distinguish cihua vs. xiuxiang recensions when given a passage or a citation.
- Detect anachronistic importation of Zhang Zhupo's commentary onto material sourced from Roy's Recension-A translation.
- Correctly attribute claims to the right critical lineage (Zhang Zhupo vs. the Chongzhen commentator vs. modern Anglophone criticism such as Naifei Ding's Obscene Things).
Active research repository, maintained by Vivien Jiaqian Zhu (朱嘉倩), Ph.D. candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley. Visiting scholar, Stanford University; Fellow, University of Cambridge.
ORCID: 0000-0002-1789-5272