텍스트의 생산과 인쇄, 그리고 독서 관습의 관계에 대하여

Text, Printing, and Reading : the Re / production and Consumption of Judge Bao Stories in the Late Ming and Early Qing

This paper focuses on a sort of genealogy of Judge Bao stories and the interrelationship between text, printing, and reading illustrated in this Judge Bao story tradition. This long Judge Bao story-cycle, ranging from Song oral storytelling to Yuan zaju drama to Ming chantefables to Ming-Qing gong'an fiction, cannot be perceived as if it were a lineal and continual history of evolution; rather, it should be considered as a genealogy in Michel Foucault's term. In order to understand what changes were made in case orally transmitted Judge Bao stories were reproduced in a commercial printing form, we must take into consideration different modes of printing, different groups of audiences, and different reading practices. As Roger Chartier has pointed out, processes of editing, printing, and circulation had profound impacts not only on the re/production of cultural meanings in the genealogy of Judge Bao stories but also on the reading public and their reading practices. It is not difficult to presuppose that each text, when orally transmitted Judge Bao stories were transformed into varied textual forms such as drama, chantefables, and gong'an fiction, would have re/produced different cultural meanings. In this paper, however, my most concern consists in the transition from Baijia gong'an to Longtu gong'an rather than in the overall Judge Bao tradition. For this transition illustrates the fact that even small differences in editing and printing, such as textual divisions, textual criticisms, punctuation, illustrations, and printing types, can make the same text produce remarkably different cultural meanings. My intention here is thus to show that the "exterior" constituting a text as a "book" form are as significant as the interior, and that only this type of textual studies, in which the interactions between text, printing, and reading are taken into account, can be developed into and interconnected with cultural studies as a whole.