Speaker: Irving Goh, Professor of Comparative Literature, Emory University
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
All are welcome. Registration is required.
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=106069
In this talk, Irving Goh will present on his latest book, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). He will share his thoughts on failure as failure, that is, failure without recuperation, failure as all negativity. Such a thinking of failure as a thorough impasse not only resists narratives of progress and ideologies of success and its accompanying notions of grit and resilience. It also registers, at the ontological level, the affective structure of existence. Irving will also discuss the literary texts that inform his work on failure.
Irving Goh is Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham UP, 2014), which won the MLA 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, L’existence prépositionnelle (Galilée, 2019), The Deconstruction of Sex (with Jean-Luc Nancy, Duke UP, 2021), and most recently, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). His next book, Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit (Cornell UP), is appearing this summer 2026. For his current book projects, he is interested in the end(s) of work, world literature and the question of citizenship, and theorizing the Asian figure.
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