Franz Xaver Erhard
@uni-leipzig.de
Leipzig University
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Tibetan Studies, Modern Literatur, Media Studies, Central Asian Studies
Scopus Publications
Scopus Publications
Franz Xaver Erhard
Informa UK Limited
ABSTRACT Within the eighteenth century, the formative period for modern Tibetan history, Tibetan aristocratic literati started to experiment with literary forms and introduced new secular elements to the Tibetan genres of life writing. The study of the Biography of Doring Paṇḍita, which exemplifies the new form of secular life writing, demonstrates how its author Doring Tenzin Penjor (b. 1760) carefully combines well-known narrative elements such as genealogy, autobiography, and memoir to establish a novel legitimation strategy that is based solely on secular authority.
Franz Xaver Erhard and Lucia Galli
Informa UK Limited
This is the second of two special issues of Life Writing dedicated to Tibet’s rich auto/biographical tradition, in all its forms and styles. 1 Ideally conceived as an ‘introduction’ to traditional ...
Lucia Galli and Franz Xaver Erhard
Informa UK Limited
This special edition of Life Writing is the first of two issues dedicated to Tibet’s rich auto/biographical tradition, in all its forms and styles. The contributions presented in The Selfless Ego I & II stem from two successful conferences on Tibetan life writing held at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, in September 2012 (Beyond Biographies: New Perspectives on Tibetan Life Writing) and in May 2017 (Global Lives and Local Perspectives: New Approaches to Tibetan Life Writing). Both events addressed issues of literary theory and cross-cultural influences, as well as questions of identity construction, power relationships, and gender conceptions as they emerge from the analysis of indigenous forms of biographical writing. As literary theorists know well, any definition of life writing—as a practice, theory, and genre—is tentative at best, as the term eludes clear taxonomic classification, encompassing a wide range of textual products about lives or part of lives. This is even truer in the case of Tibet, where the Western concept of literature—broadly conceived as an ensemble of written materials of various content and/or form—struggles to find a proper equivalent in the indigenous language. The remarks made so far should not lead to the hasty assumption that the absence of a ‘pure’ Tibetan concept of literature would de facto preclude any attempt to formulate an effective taxonomy of literary genres. Although the words used in the Tibetan language to indicate a classification—such as rik (rigs, ‘type’), de (sde, ‘class’) or nampa (rnam pa, ‘form’)—are not systematically used in reference to an abstract notion of a literary category, it is nevertheless evident that some of the issues related to genre theory were not unknown to Tibetan scholars of the past. Indian typologies, developed in the context of Buddhist doctrine, were in fact adopted—and adapted—by indigenous scholars in their efforts to translate and organise the dharma; throughout the centuries, other native forms of categorisation emerged, addressing literature as a whole, beyond the confines of Buddhist tenets and scholarship (see Roesler 2015). By merely glancing at their vast literary corpus, Tibetans appear to have been positively obsessed by life stories. The Buddhist concept of selflessness, far from deterring the production of narratives concerning the individual ego and its experiences, led in Tibet to a flurry of biographies and autobiographies—a massive production largely unmatched in Buddhist Asia. Commonly known as namthar (rnam thar, ‘complete liberation’), Tibetan biographical writings mostly narrate the vitae of Buddhist masters, exemplary figures whose life-journey was meant to educate and inspire the devout. Generally designed as edifying role models, their deceptive similarity, in topics and purposes, to the life stories of Christian saints led early Western scholars to categorise all Tibetan namthar as indigenous expressions of ‘hagiographic’ writing, containing ‘little if no information of historical value due to their exaggerated panegyric’ (Ary 2015, 103). Convincing arguments against such a gross categorisation have been recently raised by Roesler (2014), who warns against subsuming all namthar under the term ‘hagiography’, underlining the great heterogeneity these works show in terms of style and contents as well as in forms and genres, with features often surpassing those commonly ascribed to life writing. Both narratological (Rheingans 2014) and rhetoric (Ary 2015) readings
Franz Xaver Erhard
BRILL
This chapter first establishes the notion of magical realism as one among the newly adopted literary modes in Tibetan literary discourse. It then takes a closer look at two stories by the Amdowan writer Ljang bu repeatedly mentioned in Tibetan sources. The chapter finally attempts to offer an interpretation of magical realism in Tibetan literature based on these texts in order to show magical realism as literary technique understood by Tibetans as a means for the creative re-establishment of Tibetan culture and identity within the context of Chinese modernity. Keywords: Chinese modernity; magical realism; Tibetan culture; Tibetan identity; Tibetan literature