A Dialogue on The Literary Mind / The Core of Writing

Abstract

The title of this volume, Wenxin Duihua 文心對話: A Dialogue on The Literary Mind / The Core of Writing, recalls the title of the International Symposium organized by the Confucius Institute of the University of Milanthanks to the generous help of Hanbanat the Department of Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication, in May 2014. This title may sound quite unusual to a Western reader, owing to the limited familiarity with the Chinese literature in our world. It is true indeed that China today is an increasingly hot topic: its rapid economic development, the spread of its social transformation, the new signs of a different process of modernization amaze us and at the same time alarm us. Nevertheless, all this seems to overshadow its great cultural heritage, its important written tradition, the literature and poetry of classical China, a very wide field which, in Italy until now, has been largely unexplored. This is the reason why the title we decided to give our Symposiumwhich is taken from a masterpiece of Chinese literary criticism, Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龙 (WXDL) 1 , written at the beginning of the VI century A.D. by Liu Xie 刘勰 -is almost unknown to our readers 2 . In fact, we decided to take this 1 For the various translations of chapters titles, see Simona Gallo, "Decoding and Recoding Decoding and Recoding Signs and Images of Wenxin Diaolong: from Title to Titles" (pp. 99-113). 2 The WXDL contains approximately 37.000 characters. It is divided into ten juan 卷, each consisting of five chapters, carrying a descriptive title. It is written in pian wen 駢文 or pianti wen 駢體文 (parallel prose), "[…] a technique employed in the writing of extra-poetic literary genres. Its most salient features are a preponderance