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Kelsey Chen

DH Research Scholar
Department:
Modern Thought and Literature
Cohort
2025
Project Title
[of] Other Orders: Infrastructural Fabulation and Taoist Metaphysics in Sino/Anglophone Internet Literature

Kelsey Chen (she/her) is a PhD student in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University and fellow at the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race & ethnicity. She studies the divinatory poetics of technology and the mythic dimensions of the technic elided by the story of a "disenchanted modernity," tracing an "alternative" genealogy of computation back to Chinese shamanic traditions, Taoist alchemy, and occult mathematics. She is also an historian of the future, considering stories as psychic infrastructures that generate new effective realities.

Project Description

Since the beginning of the internet, "xianxia" Chinese novels have been written and released serially online. These novels are published only on the internet and are akin to "light novels," written to evoke the feeling of watching anime or reading a fast-paced graphic novel. They are highly episodic and seem to all take place in the same world: A world in which what we might understand to be "superpowers" or "supernatural" abilities are commonplace, the result of bodily and spiritual cultivation with vital breath, or qi. Such a body of literature has been voraciously translated into English and have a number of dedicated forum websites that they are posted to. The size and scale of this body of literature is more expansive than even fanfiction and composes one of the largest bodies of internet literature to date. Yet, it remains unanalyzed, likely because of its transnational and trans-linguistic context.This project will analyze the contents of this body of literature for its cultural, historical, and scientific importance, reconstructing a Taoist metaphysics and science based on these "fictions." How might these texts instead be read as spiritual and physical manuals? Many of them, in fact, contain transmissions of entire physical training regimens that are based empirically in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Our methods will be comparative, engaging religious studies, STS, translation studies, and cultural studies to parse this enormous digital archive. We will compare narrative structures, common motifs and themes.