Warring States Project
Current Research
When you know only one thing, you don't know anything. At least a second case is needed, to give some contrast, some chiaroscuro, to the; to create a wider zone of potential recognition; to suggest which aspects of a culture may be universal, and which more particular; and to test the applicability of one's methods to texts rooted in different cultures and expressed in different languages. We are in regular touch with what is going on in three fields besides our primary focus, classical China.
In each field, we focus on text formation, analyzed with the traditional toolkit of philology (most of its techniques known since Alexandrian antiquity), plus a new stylistic test of our own. We also emphasize the importance of performance in some of these texts: the simple question of how long things take, from the quatrain to the full Chinese opera, or from a single Psalm to the four-day Panathenaea presentation of the Iliad repertoire.Our approach throughout is historical-critical in nature. It is independent of orthodoxies, whether sacred or secular. Research so far has opened up new horizons of possible investigation, and enlivened many subjects that had seemed frustratingly insoluble, or else boringly solved. We believe that the future is promising.
