Popular reception of the Zhuangzi and different options of reading
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This paper presents several examples of modern usage of the Zhuangzi imagery in various sources and confronts them with those passages from the Zhuangzi that are their models. The comparison shows variability and ambiguity of the original Zhuangzi vis-a-vis the tendency to unified views and commonplace readings in the popular imagery derived from the text. It is argued that while the latter tends to construct meanings that can be easily accommodated into common human experience (though mostly as a remote life ideal), the former often presents images that are much less easily digestible. The paper focuses on differences among various instances of common Zhuangzi topics in the text of the Zhuangzi and addresses the question of how we construct meaning from a heterogeneous and ambiguous text. |
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