User:CWH/E. Bruce Brooks (Sinologist)

E. Bruce Brooks (1936- ) is an American Sinologist, Research Professor of Chinese, Director, Warring States Project, Adjunct Professor, Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Graduate Faculty, at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is known for his revisionist textual studies and translations of pre-Qin philosophical texts, many in collaboration with his wife, A. Taeko Brooks.

The Original Analects (1991) a critical translation of the Analects, the collection of sayings attributed to Confucius, argued that the received text was not written by Confucius himself or by any one later person, but was an "accretion" of oral traditions and written fragments put together by various hands and edited as late as the Han dynasty. One reviewer wrote that the book changed the way that scholars approached these early texts, and was "extraordinary book in many ways," clearly "required reading for anyone concerned with early Confucian thought."

Education and career
Brooks took a Bachelor's degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1958 and a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1968.

The Warring States Project
Brooks announced the formation of the Warring States Project, using a form of romanization that he adopted:
 * The end of feudal Jou Zhou in 0771, the emergence of a multistate system in Spring and Autumn (08c-06c), and the founding of a unified Chinese Empire in 0221, are one of the great events in world history. The Warring States Project is systematically studying the source texts, with methods standard in all the humanistic sciences. The result is a coherent and historically plausible account of China's formative centuries, revealing in greater detail than before the intellectual development leading up to the Empire.

The Project's book publications are in three areas: Sinology, Biblical and similar investigations, and poetry, whether in Chinese, Biblical Hebrew, or Homeric Greek.

Studies and translations of The Analects
Brooks and his wife, A. Taeko Brooks, a Research Associate of the Project, developed a revisionist argument over the Confucian text known in English as The Analects, traditionally attributed to Confucius, who lived in the 5th century BCE. The major publication of this project was The Original Analects, published by Columbia University Press in 1998. The Preface says that the XXX was to YYY. pointed out that the text that was accepted in imperial China could not be traced directly to Confucius himself but was pieced together several hundred years after his death. They subjected this text to archeological and stylistic tests and concluded that large parts of it were not from Confucius himself. On the other hand, they reasoned that in a society where important texts, traditions, and historical records were transmitted orally, it was also not reasonable to dismiss texts simply because they dated from later times; they might well contain valid information about events of several hundred years earlier. They held that the text was not composed by a single person or at a single time, but was an "accretion."

The Original Analects was widely reviewed. Edward Slingerland wrote that it was an "extraordinary book in many ways," clearly "required reading for anyone concerned with early Confucian thought." He added, however, that it "fails to substantiate most of its more radical claims," and finds its translations "awkward yet etymologically precise...." He particularly objected to their discounting of philosophical developments that might account for how the text was developped, prefrring political explanations. He praised the richness of their commentaries, making it an "invaluable sourcebook for students of the text." Brooks' reply was that

Robert Eno wrote that The Original Analects is an "impressive reinterpretation of the structure and history" of the Lunyu, and that he was a proponant of applying the accretion theory, but that they did not define the term "accretion" or describe the range of "textual phenomena" and "analytic tactics" entailed in such a theory.

John Makeham published an extensive review in China Review International

The Alpha Project
Another area of interest for Brooks is reflected in the Alpha Project, which
 * Another world event is the emergence of Christianity out of Judaism in the 1st century. Approached with the same standard methods, the source texts reveal a situation which has long been suspected: the existence of a pre-Pauline form of Christianity which we call Alpha. Project research is further elucidating this earliest Christianity.

Selected publications

 * Review article of W.K. Wimsatt, ed., Versification: The Major Language Types (New York: New York University Press,1972).
 * Review article of W.K. Wimsatt, ed., Versification: The Major Language Types (New York: New York University Press,1972).