Ghosts without Names? Spirit Writing and Anonymous Textuality

The speaker, Kangni Huang, received a PhD from Harvard University and is currently a member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California.  Description of her talk:  Premodern Chinese literature features pervasive anonymous authorship, despite the tendency in the critical tradition to prioritize authorial identity. This historical tension still shapes, to a certain extent, our general uneasiness about anonymous authorship: what does it mean to encounter texts without definitive author(s)? What are the logic and politics with which we, as readers, deal with these recalcitrant texts? These challenging questions become ever more pressing given the ongoing debates concerning generative artificial intelligence. To reflect on anonymous authorship, I turn to late imperial narratives about spirit writing (fuji ??), for potential inspirations. In this talk, I will mainly focus on Ji Yun’s ?? Notes of the Thatched Abode of Close Observation (Yuewei caotang biji ??????). I argue that, in these stories about anonymous ghost-writers, the writing process operates as a shared, public act, severing the final text from a single creative genius. The research demonstrates that narratives about spirit altars frame anonymous writing as a rich, participatory model of literary production.