Biography
My dissertation examines how several idiosyncratic 17th-century Chinese authors endeavored to explore the extralinguistic aspects of the voice through the portrayals of ventriloquism, whistling, bird speech, and laughter—sounds that escape, resist, or distort speech and language. In so doing, I probe an implicit discursive network centered on the problem of speech during the late Ming and early Qing. Working in the intersections of literary studies, sound/voice studies, and media studies, I persistently reflect on issues including: How do extralinguistic and nonlinguistic forms of expression and communication modify our conceptions of speech and language? How do sounds in literature enrich our acoustic experience? What makes language human? A comparatist in spirit, I also work on early medieval and medieval Chinese literature.