Contenu du sommaire : Le travail de la citation en Chine et au Japon

The disponibility of meaning in Shijing quotations Around the 7th and 6th centuries BC, the poems which were to form the Canon of Poetry (Shijing<:i>) were used by court officers to express their intentions in allegorical forms. It was a free device, the meaning of the poem quoted being dictated only by the situation. Confucius opened a new era, using the poems to suggest moral ideas. To do this, he would even play consciously and freely on the words themselves. Later, with the canonization of poems, their interpretation was rigidly codified. But poets of the classical age, while subscribing as social beings to the tenets of Confucian ideology, were able to revert to the original meaning of the poems. This was possible, one may assume, only because the early Chinese practices of quotation had been founded on the principle of total availability of meaning.

Some examples of subversive shifts of quotations in classical Chinese literature After opposing the quotation of authority - which aims at endowing one's arguments with the prestige of the given source - to the subversive quotation - which changes the meaning of the quoted extract through the effect imposed by its new context - the author concentrates on three examples of the latter case. For each example he describes the textual techniques brought into play as well as what is at stake in this transformation of meaning. The first example shows how the Huainanzi uses quotation subversively to release the significations of quotations whose meaning has been frozen by embedding them within other quotations; this is done to hide the genuine nature of the political system to which it subscribes. In the second example, we see how Zhuangzi achieves a satirical subversion of the Confucian discourse by organizing its text around a missing quotation of Laozi. The third example demonstrates how a 19th- century novel is constructed by reclaiming and transforming previous classical material.

The metaporphosis of the word : the quotation of Chinese verses as themes for the composition of Japanese Waka poems At the end of the ninth century the Japanese poet Ôe no Chisato wrote Japanese poems waka which took Chinese verses as themes (mostly taken from those of the famous Tang poet Bai Juyi). He thus initiated a new style of composition. In 1218 a Japanese poet Jien chose one hundred verses/themes from Bai Juyi's works and asked Fujiwara no Teika to compose on these themes, as he was doing himself. Among the themes chosen by Ôe, Jien and Teika, seven were common. Their analysis allows us to retrace the evolution of this innovative style of composition and to define what motivated it.

The article analyzes the ways in which citations are utilized in several plays from the time of Zeami (1363-1443). Citations had long been a key element of medieval Japanese poetry. By importing them into Noh, Zeami elevated it from a popular to a high art form, changing the composition of the audience to which it was addressed while at the same time contributing to the enhancement of the cultural status of the new audience. Moreover, the change of medium enabled Zeami to redefine the type of sources for the quotations, and not only to use classical modes of quoting but to introduce new ones that could use to advantage the length of play scripts and the metalanguages of the theater. His use of combined citations, vizualized metaphors, enacted allusions, reiterated, mis-remembered, dispersed, reconstructed and amplified quotations are examined in succession.

Quotations and awakening. Some remarks on Zhang Zai's use of quotation The interweaving of quotations by which Zhang Zai depicts the course of Confucius' life appears to make sense in terms of the pattern thus constructed. In the first part, the themes of the successive sentences posit a diachronical level where the organized progression of the different stages of the Sage's life can be seen. In contrast, the predicates develop an exposition of the eternal nature of his perfection. The second part inverts themes and predicates, though it organizes them in a text with the same structure as the first one. The author raises the question of examining how the text - and hence the quotation - work on the reader, but also, conversely, how the quotation is transformed by the text in an irreversible way.

Note concerning the implicit quotations in Chinese technical texts In differentiated ways, depending on whether they deal with botany, agriculture or horticulture, Chinese technical texts make sustained use of quotation. The author describes here the various kinds of marking used to bring quotation to the attention of the reader, and analyses different modalities of its production. The comparison of an extract from the Bencao gangmu by Li Shizhen (1596) and of its source - which it omits to mention, without enabling the reader to determine the reasons for this omission - illuminates the way in which the botanist braids the text of the quotation with his own additions to, or emphasises how he truncates it. Again, the contrasting of this same extract by Li Shizhen and its reclamation, in the context of agriculture, by Chen Haozi' Huajing (1688) enables us to observe another way of quoting a text, which has now become classic : reformulation.

The author emphasises that, while the act of quoting can be performed in various ways ranging from the reformulation of an idea to the verbatim quotation, the modalities prevailing at a given period depend on the practices of knowledge - for instance, whether written or oral approaches are more in vogue - as well as on the state of organization of the set of sources. Hence the fixation of canonical texts changes the nature of their transmission in more ways than one and consequently the kinds of reference that are made to these texts. G. Lloyd discusses three reasons for quoting that appear to have been prevalent in Greco-Roman antiquity, though their relative frequency varies according to the period : quotation may be used to create or confirm the learned status of the author using the quote ; it may provide authority for a point or a position ; it may be used to show the superiority of the author using the quote to the person whom he quotes. Needless to say, the last two modes of quotation are open to all kinds of manipulation.