Author: csgchku

“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)

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

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.

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.

不可能三角與不現身的說書人：張愛玲《傳奇》的讀寫攻略

分享嘉賓 Speaker:  邵棟 博士 Dr. Shawn SHAO (HKMU)
主持人 Moderator: 黃心村 教授 Prof. Nicole HUANG (HKU)
日期時間 Date & Time: March 26, 2024 (Tue) 16:30-18:00pm
語言 Language: 普通話 Putonghua
地點 Venue: KK101, K.K. Leung Building, Main Campus, HKU

摘要 Abstract:
《傳奇》作為張愛玲成名之作，為讀者研討品味久矣。而張愛玲其中的寫作策略，也成為學者與小說家們關心的文化政治與敘述技巧的表徵。《傳奇》是否完美無缺？張愛玲有哪些常用的寫作手段？模仿張愛玲如何可能？將成為本次講演會嘗試解答的部分問題。本次演講《傳奇》這本書的寫作策略和閱讀策略，內容會分為以下幾個部分：其一對張愛玲《傳奇》中的名篇（《封鎖》、《第一爐香》等作品）做創意寫作的拆解分析，詮釋其中的連環畫式的分場與剪輯技巧，以及其它常用敘事手段；其二，以《金鎖記》《傾城之戀》等為例，分析張愛玲女性書寫中慾望、道德、金錢的不可能三角；其三，敘事者的在場不在場，和張愛玲寫作的信心問題。 

As the work that brought Eileen Chang fame, Romances has long been a subject of discussion and admiration among readers. Chang’s writing strategies in this work have also become emblematic of cultural politics and narrative techniques, captivating the attention of scholars and novelists. Is Romances flawless? What are Chang’s frequently employed writing techniques? And how can one emulate her style? These questions will be addressed in this talk, which will be divided into the following sections: firstly, a creative writing approach will be adopted to analyse the masterpieces in Chang’s Romances (such as “Blockade” and “The First Brazier”), deciphering the techniques of sequential storytelling and editing reminiscent of a comic strip, as well as other commonly used narrative devices; secondly, an exploration of the impossible triangle of desire, morality, and money in Chang’s female writing will be presented, using “The Golden Cangue” and “Love in a Fallen City” as examples; and finally, the presence and absence of the narrator, as well as the issue of self-confidence in Chang’s literary craftsmanship, will be discussed.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
邵棟 香港大學中文學院博士。現為香港都會大學人文社會科學院創意藝術系署理系主任、助理教授。主要研究範圍是現代小說與南社，華語系文學與電影。有學術專著《紙上銀幕：民初的影戲小說》(2017 年)。業餘從事小說創作，2022年推出首部短篇小說集《空氣吉他》，入選第六屆寶珀理想國文學獎決名單。 

Shawn SHAO received his PhD from the School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong. His research interests lie in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Sinophone literature, film studies, and Nanshe studies. He is the author of the scholarly monograph The Silver Screen among Pages: A Study of Yingxi Fiction in Early Republican China (2017). He is also a fiction writer. His first collection of short stories, Air Guitar, published in 2022, has been selected as a finalist for the 6th Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize.

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)

Speaker:
Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Lecturer in English Literature, UCL

Moderator:
Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, March 11, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time (9:00 am London)
Venue: On Zoom

Last year Anthony Ossa-Richardson published (with his colleague Richard Oosterhoff) a translation of the 1526 Cosmography and Geography of Africa by the Moroccan diplomat al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, commonly known as Johannes Leo Africanus. This was the first book about Africa published in Europe and the main written source of knowledge about the continent until the eighteenth century. The translation is the first (in any language) to be based on the only known manuscript of the work, which was rediscovered in 1931. In this talk, Ossa-Richardson will discuss some of the circumstances of the manuscript discovery and its seismic implications, not only for the nature of the work itself, but for our understanding of intercultural communication in the Renaissance more generally. He will argue that, understood in its full context, the manuscript offers a powerful challenge to our notion of ‘decolonisation’. 

Anthony Ossa-Richardson is a lecturer in English literature at UCL. He has written two monographs, the more recent of which is A History of Ambiguity, an account of the way readers posited, denied, conceptualised and argued over the presence of multiple meanings in texts from antiquity to the twentieth century. In addition he has authored around thirty essays on various aspects of literary and intellectual history, including recent pieces on Proust, George Eliot, and the seventeenth-century pamphleteer John Taylor. He is currently completing a monograph on postwar British architectural thought.

Speaker:
Mingwei Song, Professor of Chinese Literature, Wellesley College

Moderator:
Pei-yin Lin, Associate Professor, School of Chinese, The University of Hong Kong

Date: Thursday, 7 March 2024
Time: 4:30 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: CBA, Chow Yei Ching Building, HKU

“Fear of seeing” constitutes the converting point of my thinking about the poetics of science fiction. Overcoming the “fear of seeing” to represent the invisible energizes this genre. Science fiction is an imaginary realm that opens up infinite new possibilities and inspiring new ways of telling stories about China and the world. Through analyzing representative works of the major authors of the new wave, I explore how the representation of the invisible creates political meaning and poetic resonance that has led to larger changes in the contemporary literary paradigm.

Mingwei Song is a Professor of Chinese Literature at Wellesley College. He is the author of Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard, 2015) and Fear of Seeing: The Poetics and Politics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia, 2023). He is the co-editor of The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First Century Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia, 2018). His Chinese-language publications include New Wave in Chinese Science Fiction: History, Text, Poetics (2020), Criticism and Imagination: Collected Critical Essays (2013), and Sorrows of a Floating World: A Biography of Eileen Chang (1996; second edition, 1998).

This event is presented by the Modern East Asian Literature Research Cluster as part of its Emerging Research on Modern East Asian Literature series. The series is coordinated by Prof. Su Yun Kim (suyunkim@hku.hk), Prof. Pei-yin Lin (pylin@hku.hk), and Prof. Alvin Wong (akhwong@hku.hk), and is supported by the School of Chinese, School of Humanities, and School of Modern Languages and Cultures. This event is organized with the support of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong.

Speaker:
Dr. Serkan Şavk
Department of Cinema and Digital Media, Izmir University of Economics

Moderator:
Dr. Peter J. Cobb
Assistant Professor, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Turkey’s domestic film industry Yeşilçam, produced nearly 6000 films from the late 1940s to the late 1980s. Most of these films had androcentric narratives depicting women characters as passive and silent subjects. In this seminar, we start by introducing Yeşilçam and the place of women in this industry both behind the camera and within the films’ narratives. We will then introduce DOYeşilçam, an ongoing interdisciplinary research project about Yeşilçam history. Finally, we will focus on a case study of about 20 select woman’s films from the 1980s either directed by Mr Atıf Yılmaz (1925-2006) or Ms Bilge Olgaç (1940-1994). Our goal is to compare how Bilge Olgaç, as a female director, and Atıf Yılmaz, as a male director, include woman characters in their films. With this goal in mind, we apply a data-driven approach, measuring and analyzing how woman characters are shot and how much they talk.

Serkan Şavk received his PhD in 2014 from Hacettepe University’s Department of History. He pursued post-doctoral studies at Princeton University with a focus on digital history (2016–2017). His research interests cover a variety of subjects, including the history of Turkish cinema, Digital Humanities, and image-space-culture relations in a historical context. He’s currently the principal investigator of two research projects: DOYeşilçam A data-driven, digital and open approach to the history of Turkish cinema: Examining stylistic features of Yeşilçam films (funded by TÜBİTAK The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) and Animals as Actors, Vehicles, and Props: Metazoa in the History of Turkish Cinema (funded by Izmir University of Economics). He is the co-editor of the book Imaginaries Out of Place: Cinema, Transnationalism and Turkey (with Gökçen Karanfil, Cambridge Scholars, 2013).

This event is co-organised by Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, and the BA in Humanities and Digital Technologies (BaHDT) Programme, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.

Speaker:
Tomoyuki Sasaki, Professor of Japanese Studies, College of William & Mary

Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, February 26, 2024
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (9:00 pm/Feb 25, Virginia/U.S.A.)
Venue: On Zoom

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, Japan experienced an unprecedented level of economic growth, transforming itself from a war-devastated country to a global economic power. Our image of postwar Japan has been shaped by this event, and we tend to see its history as a story of great national success. In his newly released book Cinema of Discontent: Representations of Japan’s High-Speed Growth, Dr. Sasaki challenges this view and details the tensions generated by massive and intense capitalist development through analyses of popular cinema produced during the era of high-speed growth. In this talk, he focuses on industrial spy films made by Daiei during the 1960s, examining how the films of this genre in general, and Black Weapon (Kuro no kyōki) specifically, represented popular anxiety about mushrooming corporate society and its increasing control over working people’s everyday lives.

Tomoyuki Sasaki is a Professor of Japanese studies at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. He earned his PhD in history from the University of California, San Diego. He has held his current position since 2016. He specializes in history, cultural studies, and film studies. He is especially interested in the issues of high-speed economic growth, inequality, uneven development, democracy, military bases, and their representations in popular culture. He is the author of Cinema of Discontent: Representations of Japan’s High-Speed Growth (SUNY Press, 2022) and Japan’s Postwar Military and Civil Society: Contesting a Better Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). His articles include “Shimizu Elegy: Capital, Patriarchy, and Desire for Freedom in Naruse Mikio’s Yearning (1964)” in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema (2023).