| The present dissertation offers a re-examination of the late-Ming Jesuit writings in Chinese from a literary perspective. My investigation finds that the connection between Jesuit works and literature is made through the medieval ars praedicandi, whose particular logic of proofs actually finds its fountainhead in such rhetoricians as Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Alan of Lille. Because of this special mode of persuasion, the Ming Jesuits "transwrite" a variety of medieval exempla from Latin and, possibly, Greek sources in their apologetical and evangelical works in Chinese.; The focal point of the present study is the Greco-Roman type of the Jesuit sermon stories. In Part One, therefore, I begin with an allegoresis of the reinterpreted and the re-told fables in the Jesuit texts to see how these tales were Christianized in the process of translation or, more precisely, transwriting. Part Two then explicates the rhetorical nature of the Jesuit use of chreia, a sub-genre of classical anecdote close to Chinese zhiren (describing men) fiction. I emphasize how these pagan chreiai were approximated for missionary purposes in Ming society.; I approach the Jesuit revival of exemplum in Ming China by an exploration of the Jesuit search of a "common language" in the empire, and conclude my analysis with a discussion of literary Platonism and its relation to the Jesuit view of exemplum in the shanshu (morality-book) context of the Ming. In conclusion, I suggest that, as in the case of Buddhist jataka stories in Chinese, the Ming Jesuit exempla as a whole, not merely those dealt with in this dissertation, should be taken as part of Chinese literature, instead of as a "foreign" one. |
