The trap of words: Political power, cultural authority, and language debates in Ming dynasty China

The dissertation is an interpretive study of Ming dynasty cultural history from the standpoint of literati debates over the function and value of written language. The debate over language played an important role in most every major political, literary, and philosophical controversy of the Ming dynasty, and in this work I map the contours of the debate as various players used the status of the written language and the critique of the same in their efforts to claim political and cultural authority.; After providing a brief history of the debate over language, and a rather more lengthy description of the problem of language in Song dynasty Daoxue, I examine key spokesmen in the evolving debate over the status of the written word in the Ming. First, I show that a faith in the written word was fundamental to the politics and poetics of the Ming political center, especially the Grand Secretariat. In contrast, and in reaction, to the perceived degeneracy of the political center, I describe how politically marginalized literati expressed increasingly grave doubts about the efficacy of language to transmit morality. I argue that this tendency culminated in the mid-Ming philosophical doctrines of Wang Yangming and the victory of his followers over the Grand Secretariat in the Great Ritual Controversy.; Beginning with one member of the defeated faction in the Controversy, Yang Shen, who has also been called the founder of Ming evidential learning, there was a renewed emphasis on the status of the written word and the importance of linguistic skill in defining cultural authority and social status. In the late Ming, the center of literati culture was no longer the political center, but the Jiangnan region. Literature as moral expression became eclipsed by literature as a marker of taste and social status in this highly commodified and highly competitive cultural milieu. I argue that it is the linguistic and literary connoisseurship of Yang Shen, and not the anti-linguistic doctrines of Wang Yangming, which most closely defines late Ming literati culture.