Confucian Prophet: Political Thought In Du Fu’s Poetry (752–757) ...

the texts must be seen only as self-contained artifacts analyzable only on their own self-contained terms. In this sense I am accepting certain areas of New Critical ground but not others. New Critical methods of poetry explication perform a twofold service for my inquiry. They first avoid the “intentional fallacy” and second provide a rich set of approaches to the full range of strictly literary features that a poet is capable of creating. But I am not adopting New Criticism’s ahistoricity. For a historical view of language, the methodological ideas of J. G. A. Pocock are essential because his concept of the role of political language in the study of politics, derived from the discipline of Western intellectual history, is strikingly close to Mark Edward Lewis’s conclusions on the relationship between literature and authority in China. I will return to this point shortly. Pocock is also important for this study because his work on method in the history of political ideas has to do with language. This is also the ground I have staked out in my inquiry of Du Fu’s poetry. Pocock argues that language is a product of history and that it possesses a history of its own. Over time, language develops systems of discourse and thought: “Men think by communicating language systems; these systems help constitute both their conceptual worlds and the authority-structures, or social worlds, related to these.” This leads to the methodological point: “[A]ny formalized language is a political phenomenon in the sense that it serves to constitute an authority structure.”⁸ Pocock explains the usefulness of this concept of language for the historian. For him, the concept of language as authority structure is a link between the study of the history of political thought and the study of the history of political society.⁹ Here a distinction must be made between the historian’s use of this idea and my use of it as a method to study the role of political ideas in literary texts. In this study I am not interested in the historian’s task of understanding a political society. I am interested in the idea of language as both a structure of authority and a conceptual world in which the individual poet exists and works. Such a linguistic world necessarily develops through time in the creation of a literary-philosophical culture and the fashioning of political structures in part conceived