Speaker: Jenny Chak, MPhil Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Caroline Levine, David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities, Cornell University
Moderator: Beth Harper, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, November 5, 2024
Time: 9:00 am Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom
The past decade has witnessed a “darker” shift in ecocritical interests, with a growing body of works examining the more disturbing aspects of the interactions between human and nonhuman nature. This trend is particularly evident in the expanding body of research seeking to theorize concepts such as ecohorror, ecophobia, and ecogothic. These ongoing discussions offer a fresh and robust perspective for the cross-cultural analysis of the works of Pu Songling 蒲松齡 (1640-1715) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), two esteemed writers renowned for probing into the unsettling facets of human experience that intersect with ecological concerns.
This talk specifically focuses on how the works of Pu and Poe exhibit a provocative sensitivity towards nonhuman animals, deviating from the prevailing ideas of interspecies reciprocity during early Qing China and nineteenth-century America. Through close readings of selected stories, I argue that they lay bare the marginalization, exploitation, and oppression of animals that underpin the anthropocentric idealism of absolute harmony between species. I also investigate the parallels between the concept of the “strange” (guai 怪) in Chinese “tales of the strange” (zhiguai 志怪) and the Gothic tradition in the Western world, entangled with the two writers’ comparable explorations of a wider, inscrutable ecology existing beyond human dominion.
Jenny Wan Ying Chak is a final year MPhil student studying Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include cross-cultural ecocriticism and Gothic theories, with a particular focus on the literary works of Pu Songling and Edgar Allan Poe in her current project.
Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2023); Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015); The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007). She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.
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