EASC Guest Speaker Series: Media as Method: New Perspectives on Early Modern Chinese Drama - Talk by Yinghui Wu

Media as Method: New Perspectives on Early Modern Chinese Drama 
Monday, November 17, 2025 | 2:00PM-3:20PM | DML 240 | RSVP

EASC Guest Speaker Series: Talk by Prof. Yinghui Wu (UCLA) with Faculty Moderator Prof. Mengxiao Wang (EALC 145: Introduction to Chinese Culture, Art and Literature) 
 

How was drama experienced in early modern China? It was not tied to a single medium such as the page or the stage, but operated in a media ecology—an environment in which it integrated other arts and media while being refashioned in a variety of arts and media. Yinghui Wu's new book takes us beyond the page-stage dichotomy in drama studies to explore a wide range of cultural experimentation that it collectively terms “playing with plays:” the theatricality embedded in commentary, the poetic and visual imagination arising from drama illustrations, the interactions between reading and singing arias, the imbrication of reading plays and practicing religion, and the ludic act of writing playful essays on drama. 
       

Wu develops a synthetic inquiry into these disparate phenomena by bringing them into dialogues with the heuristic potential of media theory. In this talk, she will offer a new model for thinking about drama history through a critical reflection on medium/media as historically specific and broader than modern mass media technology. The talk will also present specific case studies that explore the entwinement of plays and different forms of media in shaping perception, molding experience, and enabling new subject positions to emerge in early modern China. 

This event is co-sponsored by the USC East Asian Library.