The Old Master and an Ineffable Word: An Introduction to Cybertext Using Ancient Chinese Literature

Abstract

The unmanageable vastness of material covered by the term world literature presents a problem for the research in comparative literature as well as the education practices at the universities. These overviews have to include multiple temporally and spatially distant literary cultures. For this reason, they always in part exceed the study domains of the particular lecturers. The presentation of distant literatures means its integration into the culture of reception. The paper presents a part of a course which aligns a presentation of ancient Chinese literary culture and the early daoist philosophy with the most recent cybertextual phenomena, such as textual generators and social networks. The ways of exploring these topics in a seminar are addressed, and also the relevant theoretical issues that are thereby presented to the students. The specific Chinese culture with the focus on dao, the guidelines for the path of life, reflects the ways we manage the information overflow in new media, which is linked also to the disorienting idea of fake news and the loss of a reliable reality, to which one has to respond by acting strategically. The paper schematically outlines the philosophical daoism, proposes to read Daode Jing as poetry in a classroom, provides the students with the experience of a cybertextual generation of texts from Yijing, and finally links these works with the cybertextual theory of Espen J. Aarseth, as the students are invited to read electronic literature.