Month: April 2024

《異鄉記》中的多維風景

分享嘉賓 Speaker: 吳曉東 教授 Prof. WU Xiaodong (Peking U) 
主持人 Moderator: 林姵吟 教授 Prof. LIN Pei-yin (HKU) 
日期時間 Date & Time: April 25, 2024 (Thu) 16:30-18:00pm
語言 Language: 普通話 Putonghua
地點 Venue: KK102, K.K. Leung Building, Main Campus, HKU

摘要 Abstract:
廿一世紀才得以面世的《異鄉記》雖是張愛玲的一部殘稿，卻也是爐火純青之作，既呈現出遊記散文的樣貌，也涵容了豐沛的小說性。 而其文體前所未有的雜糅性和不定性，則寓意著文本的未完成性，產生了多維度的闡釋空間。本次講座從釐析《異鄉記》的文體特徵入手，透視張愛玲在異鄉書寫過程中所內涵的風景認知裝置，以及對人情世態的犀利而冷峻的審視目光，進而探討《異鄉記》所傳達 的「中國」感受，勾勒張愛玲「中國體驗」的嬗變歷程。 最後嘗試整合文本敘事、隱喻修辭、詩性語言等諸種詩學向度，彰顯《異鄉記》在張愛玲創作生涯中的獨特性。 

Eileen Chang’s incomplete manuscript Chronicle of a Strange Land was posthumously published in 2010. Originally written in 1946, Chronicle is structured like a travelogue but unfolds like a fiction narrative. Its incompleteness and stylistic hybridity lead to multiple readings. This lecture begins with a stylistic analysis of the narrative, followed by a discussion of how an internal landscape is materialized as the narrative progresses. In a land of strangeness, a particular “Chineseness” comes into shape, observed through a sharp and stern gaze, and realized in a metaphorical and, at times, poetic language. This lecture defines the uniqueness of Chronicle in the context of Eileen Chang’s entire writing career. 

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
吳曉東 北京大學中文系教授，主要研究領域為中國現代文學，大量的專著和編著中的代表作品有：《陽光與苦難》、《象徵主義與中國現代文學》、《從卡夫卡到昆德拉》、《二十世紀外國小說專題》、《鏡花水月的世界》、《二十世紀的詩心》、《一九三〇年代的滬上文學風景》、《臨水的納蕤思：中國現代派詩歌的藝術母題》、《記憶的神話》、《文學性的命運》等等。

WU Xiaodong is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature at Peking University. He is the prolific author and editor of dozens of monographs and editions including the following: Sunlight and Suffering, Symbolism in Modern Chinese Literature, From Kafka to Kundela, Case Studies of Twentieth-Century Novels, The World Through the Looking Glass, The Zeitgeist of Twentieth-Century Poetry, The Literary Landscape in 1930s Shanghai, Narcissus at the Water: A Study of Motifs in Modern Chinese Poetry, The Myth of Memories, The Destiny of Literariness, and many more.

This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series |
張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 
Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty
& Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)

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“輕微的騷動”: 張愛玲小說裡的細節與女性

分享嘉賓 Speaker: Prof. Jiwei XIAO (Fairfield University) 
主持人 Moderator: Prof. LIN Pei-yin (HKU) 

日期時間 Date & Time: April 18, 2024 (Thu) 16:30-18:00pm
語言 Language: English
地點 Venue: CPD-7.30, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

摘要 Abstract:
In xijie xiaoshuo 細節小說, or the fiction of details, a telling detail does not “exist” as a static object but tends to “emerge” dynamically as a perception, a recognition, or a recollection. Eileen Chang’s innovative use of such details, combined with her heightened awareness of the female perspective, allows her to transform the ancient xijie xiaoshuo into a distinctive modern fictional form. The concepts of xijie and xiwei 細微take on new significance as Chang employs details to evoke subtle but stirring moments of psychological-ethical crisis that her female characters must grapple with. Drawing on my Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature (2022), this presentation examines the multi-faceted meanings of the detail as the miniscule, the subtle, and the humble, exploring the intertwined ethical-aesthetic implications of deploying such details. Chang’s complex depiction of women as xiwei can be seen in both her reinterpretation of female characters in traditional xijie xiaoshuo and her engagement with new female experience and consciousness in modern times. 

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
Jiwei XIAO is Professor of Chinese and Cinema Studies at Fairfield University. She is the author of Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature (Routledge, 2022). Her work has appeared in academic journals and intellectual magazines including New Left Review, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Cineaste, and Film Quarterly. She has also written for the New York Review of Books and The Atlantic as a freelance contributor.

This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series |
張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 
Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty
& Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)

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Speaker: Chris Cowell, London South Bank University

Introduction: John Carroll, Department of History, HKU

Respondents:
Jenny Chak, MPhil Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Lory Wong, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU

Moderator: Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, April 15, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time (10:00 am London)
Venue: On Zoom

Form Follows Fever: Malaria and the Construction of Hong Kong, 1841–1849 is the first in-depth account of the turbulent years of initial urban settlement and growth of colonial Hong Kong across the 1840s. During this period, the island gained a terrible reputation as a diseased and deadly location. Malaria, then perceived as a mysterious vapor or miasma, intermittently carried off settlers by the hundreds. Various attempts to arrest its effects acted as a catalyst, reconfiguring both the city’s physical and political landscape, though not necessarily for the better. However, Hong Kong’s ‘construction’ was not just physical but also imagined. By drawing upon many unpublished textual sources, Form Follows Fever sheds new light on a period often considered the colonial Dark Ages in the territory’s history.

Christopher Cowell received a PhD in architecture (history and theory) from Columbia University. He teaches architectural history and theory at London South Bank University. His longstanding historical research focuses on both southern China and northern India, exploring the entanglement of modernity within European imperialism and its participation in architecture and urbanism.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press is offering a 20% discount for online orders of the book up to March 31, 2024. For details, visit https://cup.cuhk.edu.hk/FormFollowsFever

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Speaker: Angie Chau, Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature and Film, University of Victoria
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, April 8, 2024
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

A brief stay in France was a vital stepping stone for many Chinese political leaders during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For Chinese students who went abroad to study Western art and literature however, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition (University of Michigan Press, 2023) uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art.

Angie Chau is assistant professor of Chinese literature and film at the University of Victoria. She has published articles on modern Chinese literature, art, film and internet culture, and her research interests include contemporary Chinese literature, popular culture, visual art, and translation. Her work has appeared in journals such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Concentric, and Chinese Literature Today, and various edited volumes.

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Speaker:
Chika Kinoshita, Professor of Film Studies, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University

Moderator:
Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, April 2, 2024
Time: 4:45 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: CBC, Chow Yei Ching Building, Main Campus, HKU

Hara Kazuo’s Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974) has been justly singled out as one of the ground-breaking works in the history of Japanese documentary cinema. In Japanese language film criticism, this film that captured the male director’s former and current partners’ respective childbirths has been widely considered a precursor to a paradigm shift in documentary filmmaking, a shift from oppositional political movements in the public sphere to reflections on the self and family in the private sphere that started in earnest in the 1990s.

This talk presents a feminist corrective to this established assessment of the film, demonstrating how those private affairs – sex, pregnancy, abortion, childbirth, and childrearing – were thoroughly political and therefore public by augmenting the threads of existing scholarship that have highlighted the film’s radical performativity and the strong agency and creative contribution of the two female “partners,” Takeda Miyuki and Kobayashi Sachiko.

Based on research on Ribu zines and contemporary media discourse, this talk contextualizes Extreme Private Eros within two specific historical contexts. First, I discuss the film’s main character and driving force Takeda’s feminist activism within the history of the Women’s Liberation “Ribu” movement in the early 1970s. As Nakane Wakae has shown, even though Takeda was a central actor in the Ribu movement, a majority of the previous studies on the film focused on Hara’s authorship and thereby underestimated her historical significance. I demonstrate how strongly Takeda’s onscreen actions were linked to Ribu’s activism, particularly their 1971–1973 battle against the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s attempts to revise the Eugenic Protection Law for tighter restrictions on abortion. Second, I trace Extreme Private Eros’ exhibition history at a variety of Ribu organizations and their meetings where the film was screened, hotly debated, and written about with general sympathy and strong interest and thereby argue that considering its exhibition and reception, the film, with a man’s directorial signature, can be called a Ribu film.

In conclusion, I shed new light on Extreme Private Eros as a media event in which Takeda produces a child with an African-American GI in Okinawa to have her giving birth filmed on 16mm and circulate it through a non-theatrical network of oppositional movements, drawing on Paul B. Preciado’s concept of the pharmacopornographic regime.

Chika Kinoshita is a professor of Film Studies at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. Her research interests are in Japanese film history, with a focus on gender and sexuality. She is the author of the award-winning book, Mizoguchi Kenji: Aesthetics and Politics of the Film Medium (Hosei University Press, 2016). Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and collections in both English and Japanese.

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