SOURCE: Durrant, Stephen W. “Self as the Intersection of Traditions: The Autobiographical Writings of Ssu-ma Ch'ien.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106, no. 1 (January-March 1986): 33-40.

In the following essay, Durrant discusses the importance of tradition in early Chinese self-reflexive texts and explains how Qian avoided presumptuousness and irreverence.

Since Georg Misch's monumental study of Western autobiographical writing began appearing in 1907, autobiography has been increasingly drawn into the circle of literary study.¹ Unfortunately, little of this recent research has considered non-Western autobiographical writing, and one scholar has even argued that autobiography has an exclusively Western origin.² Such a claim is curiously ethnocentric, for China, the non-Western culture of concern here, has abundant writings that fall within the domain of autobiography, at least as Misch has drawn the boundaries of that domain.³ The study of the Chinese material, still in its infancy,⁴ may both enhance our understanding of the Chinese...