Daniel Fried
/Daniel Freed/
Pronouns: he/him
Contact
Chair, Faculty of Arts - East Asian Studies Dept
- dfried@ualberta.ca
Overview
Area of Study / Keywords
Chinese philosophy Chinese Literature Comparative Literature Intellectual History
About
I specialize in comparative approaches to classical Chinese literature and intellectual history, addressing topics of how reading and writing practices are conceived and contextualized in ancient and medieval China, and how these compare to European modes of textuality.
In my most recent book, The First Print Era, I examine the way in which print culture first took hold in the Northern Song Dynasty, and how certain ways of cultural production and consumption were changed by the widespread adoption of print over the course of the 11th century.
My previous book, Dao and Sign in History, these interests take the form of an investigation of Daoist semiotics: the first part of the work discusses this tradition in comparison with Continental philosophy of the relation of language to ethics, and the second examines the historical uses of Daoist semiotic thought in Six Dynasties China.
Currently, I am working on a work of literary non-fiction relating Daoist philosophy to social activism.
I also do have subsidiary research interests in modern Chinese literature, as well as in European literatures, and often teach these topics, as well as courses in literary theory, at the undergraduate level. However, I only accept new graduate students who are planning to work on topics in Chinese literature or philosophy from the Warring States period through the Southern Song dynasty.
Scholarly Activities
Research - Co-Editor, Routledge Studies in Comparative Chinese Literature and Culture
May 2020 to Ongoing
Routledge Studies in Comparative Chinese Literature and Culture is a new scholarly series intended to bridge Anglophone and Sinophone discussions of Chinese literary and cultural engagements with the rest of the world. Proposals for innovative, high-quality research on any subject within this field are welcome.
Research - Founding Chair, MLA Forum in pre-14th Century Chinese Literature
20180101 to 20181231
I organized the MLA forum in pre-14th century Chinese literature, and served as the first chair of the forum.
Admin - President, Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature
20171101 to 20190801
Featured Publications
Daniel Fried
2023 October; 10.4324/9781003322634
Rivers to the East: Heidegger’s Lectures on Hölderlin as Prolegomena for Daoist Engagements
2022 January;
Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy. 2022 January; 10.1007/978-3-030-92331-0_15
Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy. 2022 January; 10.1007/978-3-030-92331-0_12
Song Dynasty Classicism and the Eleventh Century "Print Modernity"
2020 January;
Dao and Sign in History: Daoist Arche-Semiotics in Ancient and Medieval China
2018 January;
(Non-)Geographical Futures of Comparative Literature [Special Issue]
2014 January;
Culture, Theory and Critique. 2014 January; 10.1080/14735784.2014.892768
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. 2014 January; 10.1353/crc.2014.0035
Dao. 2012 January; 10.1007/s11712-012-9290-1
A Never-Stable Word: Zhuangzi's Zhiyan 卮言 and 'Tipping-Vessel' Irrigation
2007 January;
Defining Courtesy: Spenser, Calepine and Renaissance Lexicography
2007 January;
Riding Off into the Sunrise: Genre Contingency and the Origin of the Chinese Western
2007 January;
Beijing's Crypto-Victorian: Traditionalist Influences on Hu Shi's Poetic Practice
2006 January;
The Politics of the Coleridgean Symbol
2006 January;
Interrogative Ecocriticism and the Rhetoric of Global Warming
2005 January;
Of Boars, Rhapsodes, and the Uses of Culturalist Error
2005 January;
A Bloody Absence: Communist Narratology and the Literature of May Thirtieth
2004 January;
Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Hermeneutics of Social Networks
2003 January;
Milton and Empiricist Semiotics
2003 January;
Daniel Fried
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