The Aesthetic-Educational Mechanism of the Miao Heroic Epic "King Yalu"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66581/ffyhx171Keywords:
Yalu Wang, aesthetic education, ritual field, soundscape, embodimentAbstract
Existing scholarship on the heroic epic Yalu Wang has tended to follow two broad trajectories: one foregrounding its aesthetic character, the other its social functions. Studies of the first kind have largely catalogued the distinctive features of the epic's aesthetic representation, while studies of the second have striven to account for its social utility. How the aesthetic force embedded in the epic actually operates within the funerary ritual upon its participants, attendees, and listeners, however, remains a question that has not been systematically addressed. Taking the ritual-aesthetic field as its unit of analysis, the present study examines the operative mechanism through which aesthetic education is carried out in Yalu Wang within that field. Preconditioned by the ritual field itself, this mechanism unfolds in three successive links: heroic narrative arousing sentiments of the sublime and the tragic; the soundscape constructing an immersive mode of perception; and collective bodily practice completing the internalization of aesthetic experience. Through these three links, aesthetic sentiment is ultimately transformed into dispositions of character. By disclosing an embodied form of aesthetic education that has long been obscured by the paradigm of visual contemplation, this study furnishes a transferable analytical framework for the aesthetic education of living oral traditions and provides an important point of reference for advancing an embodied turn within the aesthetic-education research of minority literatures.
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