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Biography of Dr. Bryant:
Daniel Bryant was born in California in 1942,
which is why he considers all of Canada east
or north of Hope, B.C. as unfit for permanent
human habitation. In 1965, he left behind
an uncompleted degree in music (composition)
at U.C. Berkeley to immigrate to Canada at
the very head of the Benedict Arnold Brigade,
wanted by the F.B.I. for refusing induction
into the U.S. Army. He became a Canadian citizen
at the very earliest opportunity, in 1973,
and has never looked back. After several years
at various forms of increasingly unskilled
labour (freight handler, bookseller, private
high school chemistry and math teacher), he
returned to university, completing an honours
B.A. in 1971 and a Ph.D. in 1978, both in
Chinese literature and both at UBC, where
his teachers included Yeh Chia-ying, E. G.
Pulleyblank, Jan Walls, Li Ch'i, James Caswell,
and Leon Hurvitz.
After three years of doctoral research at
Kyoto University, where he was advised by
Professor Shimizu Shigeru, he came to the
University of Victoria in 1976 as a Sessional
Lecturer in the then Department of Slavonic
and Oriental Studies. He was appointed Assistant
Professor in 1978 after completion of his
Ph.D. and in due course promoted to Associate
and then 'full' Professor. He served as Department
Chairman 1986-89, the first year with the
title "Director of the Centre for Pacific
and Oriental Studies."
His research interests and publications centre
in the T'ang, Five Dynasties, and Ming periods
and include work on poetry in the shih and
tz'u forms, with limited forays, restricted
to China in the ninth to thirteenth centuries,
into historical phonology and Art History.
At one time he also devoted attention to contemporary
Chinese fiction, especially the work of Zhang
Kangkang. Much of his work could be considered
to exemplify the custodial function of literary
scholarship, consisting of k'ao-cheng ('evidential
learning') studies of textual genealogy and
biographical detail, best exemplified by his
1997 book ºÎ¾°Ã÷…²¿¼ (Ho Ching-ming Ts'ung-kao
'Collected Studies of Ho Ching-ming'). He
has also ventured occasionally into criticism,
but only rarely into theory. His reviews tend
to be long and to range in tone from the glowing
to the positively soricine.
In his exiguous spare time, Professor Bryant
reads, listens to music (no junk), hikes and
birds, plots his next escape to Kyoto or Taipei,
and, on administrative request, writes third-person
essays about himself.
1. Publications
and Papers and Corrigenda
to Invisible Companion
2. Commonplace
Book
3. Current Courses (Bottom of the page)
