Jiawen Wang

Jiawen Wang is a PhD student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Trained in ancient Greek literature and poetics, her work examines literature as an interlocutor of philosophy and explores the classical foundations of modern literary theory. She is the Chinese translator of E. R. Dodds's The Greeks and the Irrational and Stephen Halliwell’s The Aesthetics of Mimesis. She is also beginning a new project that compares idyllic imagination in Classical Greek and Classical Chinese traditions.

The project

Title: Textual and visual gardens in imagination: Comparing Theocritus and Wang Lü from the perspective of the idyllic tradition

"This research explores the everyday as both a mode of articulation and a genre of modernity, examining how truth can be expressed beyond traditional scientific or propositional forms. Drawing from aesthetic and philosophical traditions—from Aristotle to Heidegger, Romanticism to modern poetry—it argues that poetry and art articulate truth through phenomenological, sensory, and non-discursive means. This everyday mode of articulating truth emerged uniquely during the historical turn of modernity and was reflected in poets of that era. In Western history, I identify two pivotal moments marking the inception of modernity: the Hellenistic period of antiquity and the 19th century. In both epochs, poets recognized that truth, like literature, requires its own genre and style. They were to some extent self-consciously invested with a project of redefining or inventing literary genres. In the third century BCE, Theocritus invented pastoral fiction (eidyllion), and Callimachus developed polyeidic small poems (to leptaleon), both reflecting a shift in poetic articulation. Similarly, in 19th-century France, Baudelaire discovered symbolism in the everyday, while Valéry advanced this project with his notion of poésie pure, emphasising the transformation of language itself. Both pairs of poets engaged in self-reflective poetic practices, thematizing their own creative activity—reading, writing, storytelling—within their poetry, a phenomenon that I term "autopoetry" or life poetry."

Hosting institution: Collège de France

Selective Bibliography

• The Chinese translation of Stephen Halliwell’s The Aesthetics of Mimesis. SDX Joint Publishing Company (Beijing), to be coming out in 2025.
• The Chinese translation of E. R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational. SDX Joint Publishing Company (Beijing), 2022.
• “The Irrational Greece and the Rationalist Dodds.” Dushu Journal (Beijing), 2022.