I have no scholarship—only a little experience and a few opinions, all fragments and memories. Don’t come expecting a course that simply gives you more facts.
— Chen Danqing

Following the pages of Mu Xin’s Literary Memoirs, Chen Danqing talks his way through the first volume, repeatedly wandering off topic. In Season 1 he recovered memories of attending Mu Xin’s classes more than thirty years ago and spoke frankly about where their tastes diverged. Season 2 expanded into anecdotes about their friendship and rare memories of the 1970s and 1980s.

A denser, freer third season

As Mu Xin’s lectures become more concentrated, Chen’s discussion moves more rapidly between close reading and digression. He explores Mu Xin’s four distinctly Chinese criteria for judging art—spirit, intelligence, craft, and discernment—and ranges across literature, painting, memory, and human character.

Topics include why older people fear the young; Mu Xin’s unpublished writing and his unrealized ambition to write a novel; Faulkner’s hierarchy of poetry, stories, and novels; Europe and imagined Western literature; martyrdom and survival; the twentieth century’s break from nineteenth-century expectations; Dream of the Red Chamber as a vast tapestry; and the rebellious Mu Xin reflected in Byron.

As in nearly all of Chen Danqing’s talks, the route is unpredictable and difficult to summarize: wherever the conversation leads, he finds something to say about art, memory, and human nature.

Chen Danqing: Digressions — Memories of Literary Memoirs