Researched and written in the shadow of the recently completed Three Gorges Dam, this dissertation begins with an "Introduction" that describes the earliest mythology of this mountainous region, which is said to have been hand-hewn by the deity-civil servant Yu the Great, so that the waters of a cataclysmic flood could drain to the sea. This proto-governmental response to natural disaster stands at the core of all later accounts of the Gorges, helping to form an aesthetic tradition that views the landscape as not only a site of trauma but also a surface created through and primed for physical alteration.

Chapter 1, "Tears in the Void: Traces of the Past in Du Fu's Three Gorges Poetry," focuses on this tradition as manifested in the interplay of the personal and the national at a moment of grave political crisis, the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763), when the iconic poet Du Fu (712-770) sought refuge in the wilds of the Gorges. In the strikingly fragmented verse that he wrote during this period, Du's fevered visions fail to coalesce into a stable landscape in the monumental mode of Yu the Great. Instead, they flicker across the surface of the Gorges in the form of fleeting, hallucinatory traces (ji) of a fractured personal, cultural and spatial order.

Chapter 2, "Reinscribing the Trace: The Three Gorges in the Song Dynasty," shows how a new genre of travel diaries and essays (ji) from the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279) transforms Du Fu's traces, stabilizing and re-inscribing them as touristic landmarks through physical and literary practices of marking, recording and verifying. The authors of these texts, writing barely a generation after the cataclysmic loss of the northern half of the empire to an ethnically non-Chinese dynasty, were acutely aware of the vulnerability of the landscape as cultural topography. For them, Du Fu offered not only a sympathetic model of the loyal minister in southern exile, but also a set of geographical and historical associations that elevated the Gorges to a landscape imbued with powerful moral significance.

Chapter 3, "Specters of Realism and the Painter's Gaze in Jia Zhangke's Still Life," turns to a new aesthetic of fragmentation that, while reminiscent of Du Fu's, is finely attuned to the contemporary pressures of global capital and national development. Focusing on Jia Zhangke's 2006 film Still Life (Sanxia haoren), this chapter explores how The Three Gorges, now on the brink of inundation, serve as the ideal venue for Jia's disassembly and recombination of earlier artistic forms--portraiture, Socialist Realism and Chinese landscape painting, as well as Tang poetry and contemporary pop music--in a work that reveals precisely how cultural practices work trans-historically to constitute this particular landscape.

While pre-modern artistic forms serve as occasional components of Jia's eclectic hybrid style, they are the very warp and weft of the American-based Chinese artist Yun-fei Ji's painting practice, the subject of Chapter 4, "Ink in the Wound: Trauma and The Three Gorges in the Painting of Yun-fei Ji." In his Three Gorges paintings Ji self-consciously manipulates spatial and temporal codes borrowed from classical Chinese painting to depict the dam project as a violent act of physical inscription and traumatic displacement. This chapter details how Ji imagines the landscape of The Three Gorges as a site of traumatic experience: both a raw wound that opens onto past traumas, especially the Cultural Revolution, and a frame for the physical and psychic consequences of the dam project.

In this dissertation I examine temporality as conceived in early Chinese historiography, through a systematic examination of four key works: the Mozi, the Zuozhuan, the Rishu;, and the Chu Silk Manuscript, all of them written during 4th through 1st century BCE. Each presents from a different perspective ideas about the mechanism of time and history. While only the Zuozhuan is commonly categorized as historical narrative, all four of these texts depend on records of the past to convey their worldview. In particular, I examine the ritual, performative, and supernatural elements that play a central role in these writings, as they are key to acquiring a deeper understanding of the prevailing concepts of time that shape thinking about history, and the narratives constructed to convey that history.

The dissertation, inspired by the "untimely" (bu shi) coming of the unicorn at the end of the Zuozhuan, traces the complex temporal issues surrounding the expected emergence of the ming jun, conventionally translated as "illuminated ruler". By teasing out the workings of prediction and prognostication that ground a shifting present in the imagined realms of a stable past and dependable future, I hope to uncover, not only how political and ethical questions contribute to the conceptualization of time, but also how time determines the nature and mechanism of history itself, as seen by the early writers.

My work in this area owes much to David Schaberg and Li Wai-yee, whose studies on the readability of written history and the decoding of the messages transmitted in the text through patterns and signs show that the pursuit of the past is not for the purpose of mere recording, but is instead a conscious effort to find answers applicable to the present. I argue that history writing aspired to the control and manipulation of historical time; by creating a narrative of the past and consolidating its multiple links to the future, the early Chinese writers of history--like (and in concert with) the diviners they wrote about--were able to explain it and, thus, to conquer it. Seen in this light, "knowing history" implies understanding and mastering the mechanisms that drive it; and, looking into the past is tantamount to "knowing" the future.

By studying philosophical and occult texts, such as Mozi and Rishu, I trace ideas of time that shape the historical narrative of Zuozhuan: where the ideas about the working of the universe come from, how they inspire history writing, and how they inform our reading and understanding of it. These features of time and history are part of a larger worldview and not confined to strictly historiographical writings. I explore the mechanistic nature of the time-agent in the Mozi treatise on ghosts "Ming gui"; and the Mohist religious doctrine. I demonstrate how the supernatural powers are believed to determine the course of history, and how this belief shapes the way history is recorded; a person, by collaborating with the supernatural, can assure a desired turn of events, and in this sense ghosts and spirits personify time. For example, I argue that Mohist thought reflects the mechanistic worldview of the contemporary daybooks, such as the Chu Silk Manuscript and Rishu, and uses preexisting beliefs and practices to build its own religious system. It is in the Rishu especially that the system of

timeliness and the power of prognostication are clearly exposed.