Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

As part of the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures 2019-2020 Speaker Series: Print, Power, and Parable in Japanese Literature, David Lurie of Columbia University will present this talk.

The story of the god Thoth and King Ammon in Plato’s Phaedrus is perhaps the most familiar example of a script-origin narrative, but such accounts also exist from ancient China and Mesopotamia.  There are also rich and provocative ancient discussions of what it means to “borrow” or “adapt” writing from an adjacent (often more powerful) civilization, including a set of related narratives in eighth-century Japanese chronicles about Korean scribes importing Sinitic writing.  Such premodern sources can be profitably juxtaposed with modern discussions of colonial and ethnological encounters with literacy, such as frequently quoted and requoted stories of “natives” taken aback at the power of writing, or Claude Levi-Strauss’s famous “Writing Lesson.”  This article considers the persistent anachronism that marks such accounts.  Whether premodern or modern, it seems they inevitably become parables or allegories of the powers of writing at the time of their composition, rather than plausible reconstructions of its earliest stages.  What lies behind this difficulty in writing the history of writing?

This event is sponsored by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment); Japan Foundation; and the Asian Studies Development Fund.

For more information, visit the website.