Home > Activities > Life Writing as Literary Relic: Image, Inscription, and Consecration in Tibetan Biography

a public event

Life Writing as Literary Relic: Image, Inscription, and Consecration in Tibetan Biography

A CBS Colloquium Series Lecture by Andrew Quintman, PhD (Cotsen-Mellon Fellow, Princeton University).

Friday, May 15, 2009
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
243 Royce Hall, UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095

What are the contours of Tibetan life writing? What are its limits, its trajectories? This presentation will address a largely unstudied form of biographical writing used in the consecration of Tibetan visual representations, especially portraiture. Such works were frequently inscribed on the back of hanging portrait scrolls, in many cases meticulously outlining the form of a st?pa, as part of the process for ritually vivifying the image. As various forms of life writing began to dominate the Tibetan literary landscape, such biographical inscriptions came to embody their subjects both literally and literarily in the form of an image-text relic. This type of biographical inscription calls into question some common assumptions about the functions of biographical narratives and highlights the fluid relationships between image and text, while also offering clues about the communities that produced, appreciated, and maintained the images and their inscriptions.

Cost: Free and Open to the Public

For more information please contact

Jennifer Jung-Kim
Tel: 310-825-2089
jungkim@international.ucla.edu