UC Riverside

The problem of the strange has exerted a powerful fascination on different literary traditions. In China, zhiguai (translated as “accounts of the strange”) was produced in great number, ranging from administrative reports of drought and misrule to accounts of apparently supernatural events. What makes it even more intriguing is the involvement of Confucian literati; scholars who normally did not deign to discuss the extraordinary were actively engaged in compiling these accounts. Literary criticism on zhiguai has also been a tenuous construction. Zhiguai shifts among different bibliographical categories, and was not recognized as a genre until the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Even today there has never been scholarly consensus on its definition. Zhiguai, therefore, is strange in its content, compilation and criticism. What are these accounts? How shall we read them? By what criteria should we judge what is strange and what is not? My dissertation offers a theory of the strange by defining zhiguai as a genre. Tracing its development in classical Chinese literature, I analyze how zhiguai challenges categorical dichotomies – history vs. fiction, natural vs. supernatural, and belief vs. disbelief – and occupies a liminal status in between. The result is a reassessment of what is normal, natural and real vis-à-vis what is anomalous, supernatural and fantastic. Devising a new ontological framework – this-world and other-world(s), I argue that it is the interaction between the two – the esoteric and/or exotic and our quotidian empirical experience – that defines the genre. The theoretical part of the dissertation is complemented with two case studies – Shenxian zhuan (Traditions of Divine Transcendents), a 4th-century zhiguai collection, and various examples in contemporary Chinese cultural production from television programs to internet gossip. Through a diachronic study as such can I uncover how the strange is woven into everyday life, and how this age-old Chinese literary genre that appears to be marginalized in its own time and nearly extinct in our modern world is still thriving today.