Work for Tuesday’s class – Tang Poetry
Hi everyone,
For next Tuesday’s class we’ll be reading and annotating some poems by Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu, the master poets of the Tang Dynasty. This poetry is generally considered the high point of China’s three-millennial old history of poetry.
Since we only have one class to explore this topic, we’ll divide up the tasks again so that each of us can contribute to our class discussion. There are two different “tasks” you can sign up for: either you’re going to do background research on the Tang Dynasty or one of the poets, or you’re going to annotate / close read poems with hypothes.is on our site.
Please sign up for either background/author info OR poetry annotations below:
Background / Author info
What to do: sign up for one of the topics below, do research using the sources on the Tang Poets pages (under readings), write one or two paragraphs on your topic (you don’t have to say everything there is to say about it! Focus on what you find interesting). Post with a photo on our site and be ready to talk about it in class.
One student per topic:
- Tang Dynasty
- Tang Poetry (general info- make sure to read the resource on the Chinese Scholar-Official)
- Wang Wei
- Li Bo
- Du Fu
Poetry Annotations
What to do: Sign up for a poet below and then read the poems on your poet’s page (under “readings”) using hypothes.is. In your annotations, you can ask questions about the poem, note what you find striking or meaningful, or try to distill meaning, all the while paying attention to tone, rhythm, imagery, allusions, metaphors, etc. If you come across a word or name that you don’t know, look it up (use the resources list on the bottom of the same page) and post your findings in your annotations (so we’re going for close reading as well as contextual and vocabulary annotations this time).
2 or 3 students per topic:
- Wang Wei’s poems
- Li Bo’s poems
- Du Fu’s poems
Please email me if you have any problems or questions. Also, please let me know if you can read or understand modern Mandarin Chinese (and definitely if you can read Classical Chinese), as that would be a great way for us to look at these poems in the original and English translations.
Thank you and see you next Tuesday! I’ll send another mail about the final group project soon too, just make sure you’ve signed up for a group (link under “assignments”)