Syllabus
SLOP6608 in one page: the question, the twelve rules, the creatures each is tested against, and what you hand in.
What this course is
Want to learn something with no use whatsoever?
You are reading a book that catalogues monsters by geography, and it occurs to you that you could build something like a modern taxonomy on top of it. That is the entire premise. Twelve weeks later you will have one, it will work about half the time, and the half where it does not is the half worth having.
Come and classify monsters. Feel the complexity. Watch the system get torn down and rebuilt. It may give you ideas the next time you design a classification of your own — of something, perhaps, that matters.
The formal version of the same question, for anybody who has to write it on a form. Can a rigorous classification system be built for the creatures of the 山海经 (Shānhǎijīng, the Classic of Mountains and Seas)? The course holds that question for twelve weeks and argues for partly. Nobody is pretending otherwise, and the failures are what you are assessed on.
What you need before you start
Two things, and neither of them is a reading list.
A basic acquaintance with the Classic of Mountains and Seas. Nobody expects you to have read all 18 卷 (juàn, scrolls), and nobody in the room will have. You should arrive knowing what kind of book it is: a geographical survey that files creatures by where you would meet them, in records that are routinely three clauses long. Week 1 introduces it properly. If you are meeting the title for the first time on this page, read one chapter of any complete edition beforehand and you will be fine.
Enough taxonomy to know what a type specimen is. This is a 6000-level code and the level is the reason: the course argues with Linnaeus rather than introducing him. No Latin is required and no biology degree. What is required is being comfortable with the idea that a name is attached to a specimen because somebody decided it was and wrote the decision down.
No prior Chinese is assumed. Every line the course quotes carries an English translation beside it, creature names are given with pinyin on first use, and the course's own prose is English throughout.
Three phases, four weeks each
Weeks 1–4
Build a system that works
The system is assembled from the cleanest records and it fits them, which is the part that should worry you.
Weeks 5–8
Push it until it strains
Each candidate character is put under a case it was not chosen for. Four of them do not survive.
Weeks 9–12
Take it apart and rebuild
Other traditions, then a system of your own for material nobody has sorted.
The twelve weeks
Every week states exactly one rule and tests it against at least three creatures. Creatures recur on purpose: the same record read under a different rule is supposed to look different, and a recurring creature that reads the same twice means the second week has no rule of its own.
One week has slides, and only one. Week 3 puts four composite bodies side by side and counts their parts, which is an argument prose cannot hold on one screen. The other eleven make arguments that read better as sentences, so they get none — a deck per week would be a format decision standing in for a teaching one.
| Week | Topic | The rule it states | Tested against |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What a classification system is | The text is already a classification: it files every creature by where you would meet it, which is a claim about the world and not the absence of one. | 狌狌 (xīngxīng)、鹿蜀 (lùshǔ)、猼訑 (bóshī)、九尾狐 (jiǔwěihú) |
| 2 | Reading the source text | 其状如X，Y首，见则Z (qí zhuàng rú X, Y shǒu, jiàn zé Z, shaped like X, with Y heads, and where it appears, Z) is a template the text reaches for and often leaves incomplete, so the first character a taxonomy has to handle is an absent one. | lùshǔ、夫诸 (fūzhū)、軨軨 (línglíng)、蛊雕 (gǔdiāo) |
| 3 | Morphological classification | A composite body is assembled from a small closed set of parts, so the parts and not the whole are what a taxonomy can count. | 帝江 (dìjiāng)、陆吾 (lùwú)、天吴 (tiānwú)、开明兽 (kāimíngshòu) |
| 4 | Geographic classification | The 山经 (Shānjīng, the Mountains chapters) routes can be mapped and the 海经 (Hǎijīng, the Seas chapters) cannot, so a habitat field that accepts both is recording two different kinds of fact under one name. | fūzhū、陵鱼 (língyú)、讙头 (huāntóu)、驺吾 (zōuwú) |
| 5 | Omens and uses | Neither an omen nor a use is a character of the creature: 见则天下大旱 (jiàn zé tiānxià dà hàn, where it appears, the world goes dry) attaches word for word to at least six unrelated creatures, and a use states what a person gets rather than what the creature is. | 顒 (yú)、肥遗 (féiyí)、毕方 (bìfāng)、línglíng、旋龟 (xuánguī)、bóshī |
| 6 | The god and the beast | The text's own words 神 (shén, god), 獸 (shòu, beast), 鳥 (niǎo, bird) and 人 (rén, human) do not sort by body: lùwú and kāimíngshòu guard one mountain with nearly one body and are filed apart, and several records name no kind at all. | lùwú、kāimíngshòu、dìjiāng、烛阴 (zhúyīn)、精卫 (jīngwèi) |
| 7 | Drift | A name outlives its record: jiǔwěihú is never named in the text, so everything the name now carries was added after the record closed. | jiǔwěihú、xīngxīng、jīngwèi、huāntóu |
| 8 | One name, many creatures | One name takes many creatures and one creature takes many names, and no field in the entry can hold either fact. | féiyí、讙 (huān)、窫窳 (yàyǔ)、并封 (bìngfēng)、相柳 (xiāngliǔ)、xuánguī、tiānwú |
| 9 | Other systems | Other bestiaries sort by what a creature is for the reader, so their top division is a fact about the reader rather than about the creatures. | zōuwú、zhúyīn、夔 (kuí)、jiǔwěihú |
| 10 | Cross-system comparison | Putting one creature through two systems shows which of its features each system had to ignore, and the ignored features are where the two systems actually disagree. | jiǔwěihú、dìjiāng、kuí、zōuwú |
| 11 | Beyond the Classic of Mountains and Seas | A system transfers only as far as its characters do, so the test of one is naming which of its characters the next material will not supply. | fūzhū、kuí、dìjiāng、jiǔwěihú |
| 12 | The taxonomic congress | A new entry is admissible only if it cites a line and declares which of its own fields that line does not supply. | bóshī、gǔdiāo、yú、yàyǔ |
What you hand in
| Piece | Due | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Reclassification essay | 10 May 2027 | 15 per cent |
| Bestiary entry | 24 May 2027 | 25 per cent |
| Specimen cards | 24 May 2027 | 20 per cent |
| Classification design | 28 May 2027 | 30 per cent |
| Peer review | 28 May 2027 | 10 per cent |
| Total | 100 per cent |
What the course quotes, and how
Every quoted line comes from one edition, 山海經 (the Classic of Mountains and Seas), 四庫全書本，郭璞注 — the Siku Quanshu text with 郭璞's (Guō Pú) commentary. The received text has 18 juàn, and the course reads all of them: the working bestiary is 25 creatures carrying46 cited lines, with at least one record in every chapter.
No page writes a line of its own. Where a line cannot be found the entry says so and claims nothing after that, which is the rule thepolicies page states in full and the rule the final congress admits entries under. The binomials are this course's inventions and every page that prints one says so.