Narrating Liminality and Transformation
Narrating Liminality and Transformation
“Narrating Liminality and Transformation” examines the changing social and intellectual structures that engendered literati identities in the second half of the Tang. The cultural and aesthetic consequences of these changes shaped how literati conceived of the self as entities capable of initiation and advancement. As civil service examination recruitment began to mature in the second half of the Tang, a new notion of being established was being worked out in the cultural imagination. Its metaphors of transformation were being deployed in poetic language, but the nature and temporality of this process of transformation were more fully explored in extra-canonical narratives. Repeated literary figures point to a reconception of life between rungs on the ladder of success. In this reconception, Chang’an as a city and space served as the site for and mechanism of the transformations (real, imagined, or anticipated) at the center of a changing literati identity.
Keywords: literati identity, rite of passage, liminality, civil service examination, jinshi degree, recruitment, transformation, threshold, self-conception
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