蔡九迪（Judith T. Zeitlin）任芝加哥大学东亚语言文明系与戏剧和表演研究委员会讲座教授 (William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor)，主要研究方向为明清文学、戏剧、音乐和视觉文化。著有《异史氏：蒲松龄与中国文言小说》（任增强译，江苏人民出版社，2023）、《倩女：明末清初中国文学中的幽明与性别》（何博译，江苏人民出版社, 2026）；《明清文学、戏曲、医学探踪——蔡九迪自选文集 》（将由南京大学出版社出版）。其他已发表的英文研究著作包括：与李雨航合编的 Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture (Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 2014)、与玛莎·费尔德曼（Martha Feldman） 合编的 The Voice as Something More: Essays Toward Materiality (The University of Chicago Press, 2019)。她的最新著作题为No Banquet Without Music: Operatic Culture in Early Modern China（将于2027年由芝加哥大学出版社出版）。目前正与中国作曲家姚晨合作创作《聊斋志异》题材歌剧，并开展由美国国家人文基金支持的《聊斋志异》的全书英译工作。

Judith T. Zeitlin is William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. A scholar of early modern Chinese literature, her innovative work combines literary history with other disciplines, including visual and material culture, theater, music, medicine, gender studies, and film.

Her many publications include No Banquet without Music: Operatic Culture in Early Modern China (The University of Chicago Press, forthcoming in 2027), The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (University of Hawaii Press, 2007), Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford University Press, 1993), and co-edited works such as Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture (with Yuhang Li; Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 2014), and The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality  (with Martha Feldman; University of Chicago Press, 2019).

She is currently collaborating with Chinese composer Yao Chen on an opera inspired by a story from Liaozhai's Tales of the Strange. She is now working on a complete English translation of this famous Chinese collection, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

中国文学史与戏剧史研究者能够为图像分析提供哪些独特的方法与视角？本讲座以罗聘《鬼趣图》为个案，探讨跨学科研究的路径。

在扬州八怪中，罗聘是最为年轻的一位。他最负盛名、也最为奇特的作品当属《鬼趣图》。此卷累积了百余则题跋，其中不乏当时著名士大夫的手笔。《鬼趣图》手卷现存两种主要版本，至迟完成于1771年与1797年。本讲座聚焦于前者，提出三个主要论点。

首先，《鬼趣图》由不同时期陆续绘成、彼此独立而主题相通的画幅组合而成，实际上将鬼怪故事集的组织形式转化为了绘画的视觉结构。其次，罗聘创造性地使用湿纸画法，形成了一种独特的视觉语言，由此捕捉到了文学传统中鬼无影无形，转瞬即逝的审美特质。第三，尽管艺术史学家们常常在“高雅艺术”中追溯罗聘画中鬼魂形象的渊源，但仪式绘画与仪式戏剧或许才是他更为直接的灵感来源。

尽管本讲座的一项核心任务是探究罗聘笔下这些奇异的形象何以能够被当时的观者识别为鬼魂，但讲者同时认为，各幅画面所暗示的故事并无确指，而这种不确定性，恰恰激发了观者在围绕《鬼趣图》不断涌现的种种回应中所展现的丰富联想与创造性阐释。

What special methods and perspectives can a historian of Chinese literature and theater bring to visual analysis? This lecture provides a test case showing how to do interdisciplinary scholarship.

Luo Pin 罗聘 (1733-1799) is the youngest of the so-called Yangzhou baguai 扬州八怪-- Eight Eccentric Painters of Yangzhou. His most famous work is the extraordinary Ghost Realm Amusements Scroll 鬼趣图, which accumulated more than 100 colophons, many by the most famous scholar-officials of the day. The handscroll survives in two principal versions, the earlier completed by 1771, the later by 1797. My lecture concentrates on the earlier version to make three basic points. First, as an assemblage of disconnected but thematically linked images done on different occasions the painting transposes the ghost story collection to visual form. Second, Luo Ping’s innovative wet paper technique enabled him to create a visual language that captured an aesthetics of invisibility and evanescence applied to specters in the literary tradition. Third, although art historians have mainly sought to locate the visual antecedents for his ghost images in “high” art, ritual painting and ritual opera may have been more proximate sources of inspiration. Although a central task of my talk is to investigate what made Luo Ping’s unusual images legible as ghosts to contemporary viewers, I argue that the indeterminacy of the story implied in each scene is also responsible for the imaginative speculation and interpretative invention that has characterized the outpouring of responses to the painting.