Zong-qi Cai (蔡宗齊) is a bicultural U.S./China academic based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches Chinese literature and Classical Chinese poetry and leads the Forum on Chinese Poetic Culture. Cai also teaches as the Lee Wing Tat Chair Professor of Chinese Literature at Lingnan University (Hong Kong). Widely published in both English and Chinese, Prof. Cai puts equal emphasis on individual research, collective contributions and the development of a mutually beneficial East-West literary academic culture. Cai edits the Columbia University Press series How to Read Chinese Literature as well as the Brill book series Chinese Texts in the World, the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (Duke UP), Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature (Duke UP), and Lingnan Journal of Chinese Studies.
Early focus on Six Dynasties period
Zong-qi Cai's revised doctoral dissertation published in 1996 as The Matrix of Lyric Transformation: Poetic Modes and Self-Presentation in Early Chinese Pentasyllabic Poetry is foundational for the studies of the birth and evolution of one of the most important Chinese poetic genres. His committee at Princeton University included Chinese poetry mentor Yu-kung Kao and Andrew H. Plaks. This lyric genre emerged from the Han dynasty Music Bureau or Yuefu tradition, cultivated a distinct literati ancient style in the Nineteen Old Poems, and developed diverse modes of self-presentation in the poetry of Cao Zhi and Ruan Ji. The continuity from the earliest specimens of Chinese poetry through its subsequent developments can be experienced with unique intensity due to Cai's emphasis on close readings of the original. While the grandeur might be taken for granted in these early works, as well as selective use of folksiness, Cai traces many distinct emerging themes and emphasizes that of transience because of its centrality to subsequent Six Dynasties concerns.
Liu Xie (ca. 465 - ca. 521) enjoys paramount status among ancient Chinese literary critics in part because his major work survived, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons. In 2001, Cai edited and published A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin Diaolong, a thorough treatment of this masterwork. Notable contributors included Kang-i Sun Chang, Wai-yee Li, Shuen-fu Lin, Richard John Lynn, Victor H. Mair, Stephen Owen, and Andrew H. Plaks, among others. Stephen Owen explains how Liu Xie's formal exposition embodies a "discourse machine" with a logic that contends with Liu's authorial discretion. Owen's Readings in Chinese Literary Thought explains and translates portions of Wenxin diaolong (183-298) but A Chinese Literary Mind is noteworthy in contrast for its comprehensive treatment by multiple contributors.
Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, & the Universe in the Six Dynasties, edited by Cai in 2004, includes contributions by Kang-i Sun Chang, Ronald Egan, Wai-yee Li, Shuen-fu Lin, Victor H. Mair, and others. The Six Dynasties were an important gestational period for traditional Chinese culture when the roots of many later developments first took hold, influenced both by the contending political entities of the period and by the widespread assimilation of Indian Buddhist outlooks. Essay topics include the philosophical conversations of A New Account of the Tales of the World that contributed to the emergence of aesthetic self-consciousness and also the artistic significance of Shen, the Chinese word for "spirit." During these formative years for Chinese traditional culture, activities such as literature, music, painting, calligraphy, and gardening began to take on their associations with metaphysics and higher meaning.
Expanding contributions to Chinese literary studies and outreach
Cai's monograph Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism (2002) emphasizes the need for "transcultural" studies as a step beyond cross-cultural assimilation. Juxtaposing the Chinese and Western traditions of literary criticism, Cai offers detailed comparative studies of William Wordsworth's analysis of the creative process and Liu Xie’s, between Plato and Confucius, between Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound's views of the Chinese written character and the aesthetics of the dynamic force embodied in Chinese calligraphy, as well as between the philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Madhyamaka Buddhism. This bicultural or transcultural approach presages Cai's later endeavors to bring the communities of Chinese and American academics together, promoting the investigation of traditional Chinese culture by increased international sharing of perspectives.