Tran, Hoai Khai2021-09-092021-09-092021-05Tran_cornellgrad_0058F_12451http://dissertations.umi.com/cornellgrad:12451https://hdl.handle.net/1813/109813347 pagesNguyễn Văn Đạt (a.k.a., Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm, 1491–1586) was a sixteenth century poet, scholar-official, and teacher in northern Vietnam. Starting in 1535, he served as a Mạc Dynasty (1527–1677) official until 1542, when he retired to his native village on the northern Vietnamese coast. He adopted the life of a recluse and produced volumes of poetry about his experiences in politics, war, and reclusion. As valued as he was in life, his reputation only grew after his passing. Later generations remembered him as a sagacious, prophetic figure whose advice to Vietnamese leaders dictated the course of history. This dissertation explains this transformation as the result of successive replications of Nguyễn Văn Đạt’s particular style of reclusion poetry through social literary interactions centered around the places he wrote about in life, namely White Cloud Hermitage and Centered Mooring Shelter. Đạt styled the former in the memory of the renown worthy Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442), whose dwelling in retirement, White Cloud Hermitage, Đạt assumed as the name of his own retirement studio and sobriquet. With this gesture of association, Đạt cast himself as a recluse of historical proportion even as he abandoned the arena of political contestation. Although he linked himself to Nguyễn Trãi’s memory, Nguyễn Văn Đạt forged his own literary persona around the two structures he built upon retirement. Đạt made his hermitage and shelter sites of literary exchange and, through such social interactions, Đạt and his contemporaries created a style a poetry apropos visitation to his hermitage and shelter. This poetic style incorporated the language of divination from the Book of Changes and spoke in the voice of an aloof observer of the world’s affairs from the perspective of a conceptual space “outside it all,” which was embodied by Đạt’s hermitage and, especially, Centered Mooring Shelter. Once planted in these tangible sites, Đạt’s literary persona could outlast the person, and his literary habit eventually grew into a poetic tradition that later poets perpetuated whenever they visited the places Đạt inhabited in life. In time, their collective musings fostered Đạt’s remembrance as a prophet of the ages.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 InternationalMac DynastyNguyen Binh KhiemNguyen TraiVietnamVietnamese historyVietnamese literaturedissertation or thesishttps://doi.org/10.7298/nypv-2a59