Time: October 23rd, 2025, at 14:00 - 15:30 Venue: FAMES room 8/9.
Speaker: Giovanni Vitiello (Universita di Napoli L’orientale)
Abstract:
Part of a larger project on pornographic fiction and its place in late imperial literature, this study focuses on the trope of the final retribution of the libertine’s sexual transgressions. In many of this kind of narratives, in fact, the libertine protagonist is made to pay in the end for his (or, occasionally, her) immoral deeds, after which he (or she) typically embarks on an ascetic path of redemption with the goal of obtaining spiritual emancipation. In addition to this widespread plot, however, atypical narratives can also be found in which the libertine’s infractions are retributed only in an approximative and faulty fashion. Stories of this type often take the form of cynical comedies, through which the narrator almost appears to invite the reader to at least partly justify the libertine’s transgressive behavior, if not even make light of it and condone it. This has in turn the effect of casting a disquieting shadow on the notion of an infallible justice that will inevitably intervene to punish people’s crimes. In such narratives, in other words, the conventional and reassuring mechanism of the retribution plot appears to get jammed, arguably with the result of disorienting the reader. The present study explores this rhetorical variance by focusing on two pornographic short-story collections from the mid-seventeenth century—Enamoured Enemies (Huanxi yuanjia 歡喜冤家) and All This Passion (Yipian qing 一片情)—and by connecting them with the far better known fictional works by Li Yu, both his short-stories and his novel The Carnal Prayer Mat (Rou putuan 肉蒲團.)
Speaker bio:
Giovanni Vitiello is professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” After obtaining a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and being a post-doctoral fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden (The Netherlands), from 1999 to 2013 he has taught pre-modern Chinese literature at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. His research focuses on fiction and the history of sexuality in late imperial China; his projects have received the support of the European Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of The Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.) His most recent publication, an article entitled “The Boundaries of Obscenity: Transgressive Sexual Narratives in Feng Menglong’s (1574–1646) Short-Story Fiction” has appeared last year in the journal Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China.