The Literary-Critical Use of the Term Duncuo 頓挫

Though apparently a peripheral literary-critical concept, duncuo 頓挫—roughly, “unpredictable variability within a literary text”—illustrates core attitudes and key developmental dynamics of the premodern Chinese critical tradition. This article surveys the term's development from the Han dynasty through the Qing and catalogs the surprisingly wide range of techniques and textual characteristics it came to denote. The author contends that, despite the term's sometime ambiguity, most of these disparate techniques and textual characteristics were united in intimating that the text to which they belonged did not completely account for itself. Duncuo thus involved the text in realities larger, more complex, and more alive than any text could capture completely.