Speaker: Haiyan Lee, Walter A. Haas Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Respondent: Marco Wan, Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, HKU
Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, November 28, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower
Current events have pressed home the disconcerting truth that the law is not synonymous with justice, and that its apparatus is liable to entrench as much as curb systemic injustices. Nowhere is the discrepancy between law and justice more starkly on display than in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. A contemporary Chinese novel, Sunspots by Xu Yigua, transposes the fault line of the French novel to a society newly committed to the rule of law. Here three fugitives seek private redemption by pouring their hearts and souls into the raising of an orphan girl while quietly holding down menial jobs; a determined cop gets on their trail; when they are eventually ensnared by the net of law, the reader must grapple with the (mis)carriage of justice at the very moment in which justice is served. From this comparative reading, I launch into a broader reflection on why we love anti-heroes and why society cultivates the criminal imagination.
Haiyan Lee is the Walter A. Haas Professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950, winner of the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, and A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination.
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