Year: 2009

Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop Presents:

A Revolutionary Women’s Culture:

Re-writing Femininity and Women’s Experience in China,

1926-1949
 

A Mock Job Talk by Anup Grewal
Ph.D candidate, EALC

*PLEASE NOTE THE UNUSUAL TIME AND LOCATION

Tuesday, November 24
3:30-5:30 p.m.

HM 103
(William Rainey Harper Memorial Library

  1116 E. 59th St.)

The Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop is pleased to present:

“Iconoclasm in Self-Expression: Narratives of Love and Guilt”

(the third chapter from her dissertation, “Forbidden Enlightenment: Self-Articulation and Self-Accusation in the Works of Yu Dafu (1896-1945).”)

Valerie Levan

Ph.D.  Candidate

 Department of Comparative Literature

with a response by Scott Mehl (Ph.D student, Department of Comparative Literature)

October 23(Friday) 3:00-5:00 PM 

Room: Judd 313

A summery of  the second section of the paper (pages 20-35):

Section II. Modern Spirits. Modern Flesh?

This section begins with a brief discussion of the “conflict of spirit and flesh” ( ling rou chongtu) as it appeared in the critiques of Yu Dafu’s contemporaries.  First I explore the “conflict of spirit and flesh” as a foreign import that differs from traditional notions of passion/ritual, order (qing/li, li).   The paragraphs that follow are a brief “East-West” comparative discussion of the association of guilt with sex and romance.  I then use these two discussions – of the “conflict of spirit and flesh” and the association of guilt with sex and romance – as the basis for my theory of the modern Chinese male progressive’s romantic predicament circa 1920-1930.  I use Zhang Jingsheng’s (aka Dr. Sex) sexological studies and the famous Ms. Chen debate to illustrate this situation of an educated male public eager for information on modern romance and forced to function in a world of ill-defined romantic moral standards.  

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates, please contact jiyoung22@uchicago.edu

Faculty sponsors: Michael Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene

The workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Ji Young Kim (jiyoung22@uchicago.edu) or Ling Zhang (ling1@uchicago.edu)

The Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop invites you to attend:

Writing Ethnicity in Contemporary China:

A Conversation with Six Writers

We are going to discuss issues such as how these writers bring their own ethnic background into their writing in Chinese, how they deal with the relationship between artistic creation and politics in contemporary China, and so forth. Feel free to bring up related issues which interest you.

We are also going to show some short clips from the Chinese film “Green Tea” (lv cha, 绿茶), which is directed by Sixth Generation director Zhang Yuan (张元) and adapted from a short story written by JIN Renshun 金仁顺, one of the writers who will participate in the event.

Participants:

CAO Youyun 曹有云 (Poet, Tibetan ethnicity)
GUO Wenbin 郭文斌 (fiction writer and essayist from Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region)
JIN Renshun 金仁顺 (fiction writer and screenwriter, Korean ethnicity)
NIE Le 聂勒 (Han name 钟华强Zhong Huaqiang, poet and editor, Wa ethnicity)
WANG Hua 王华 (fiction writer, Gelao ethnicity)
HU Xuewen 胡学文 (fiction writer, Vice-President of Hebei Writers’ Association, Han ethnicity)

Interpreter:

Guo Li 郭丽 (Ph.D Candidate, Comparative Literature, University of Iowa) 

Moderator:

Paola Iovene (Assistant Professor in Modern Chinese literature, Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations, University of Chicago)

   October 12 (Monday) 3:00-5:00 PM

           Room: Cobb Hall 409

The discussion will be in both Chinese and English.  

Please download the writers’ biographies and writing samples (both in Chinese and English)

Biographies

cao youyun’s poem (Chinese) 

Guo Wenbin’s revised story_9_25 (English)

Guo Wenbin’s short story (Chinese)

Jin Renshun—In Dunhuang (English)

Jin Renshun’s short story (Chinese) 

Li Hui’s poems (Chinese)

Nie Le’s poem (Chinese)

Poetry with trans (both)

Wang Hua’s short story (Chinese)

Wang Hua’s tranlated text (English)

*If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates,  please contact jiyoung22@uchicago.edu
  

**Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance,  please contact Ji Young Kim (jiyoung22@uchicago.edu) or Ling Zhang (ling1@uchicago.edu)

The Art and Politics in East
Asia Workshop

Presents:

Poetry in Action:

The Narrativity of Oracular Poems in Southeast China’s Divination

Xueting Liu

Ph.D. Candidate

Anthropology

Friday, May 22
3:00-5:00 p.m.

Judd 313

Abstract:

To describe JinBang as a village of poetry might invite severe challenges if the concept of poetry is restricted to
elegant classical Chinese regulated verse or free verse rich in “literariness”. This southeastern Chinese village situates in southern Fujian, with tea industry as the 9000 residents’ main means of life. 20% villagers are illiterate according to the official statistics, and the fact that most of the villagers older than 30 speak only local dialect makes the classical Chinese poetry recitable only by the school children. Yet poetry in its broader definition, i.e. verse, is present in every household and at every street corner. JinBang villagers listen to the poetry read as lines in local drama including puppet theater, Xiang opera and Ge Zai opera; they receive temple oracles in form of poems in the village temple Xing Yi Dian; and poems and poetic images are even the source of lottery number guessing. Closely bounded with their idea of fate and history, the reading of poems remains a crucial position both in JinBang village life and in individual villager’s life history and calls for the reader’s reflexive understanding and creativity in
discovering the hidden meanings in texts and the hidden possibilities in the life history of the characters that poems depict.

In this paper, I will discuss the narrativity of temple oracular poems in JinBang and the temple divination
practice (Chou Chien) as its context, because as the intersection of poetic text and the concept of fate, the oracular poems sheds light on an understanding of the framework the villagers employ in viewing their life crises and historical events. There being no easy, formulaic solution to either the problem that the petitioner faces or the problem of interpretation that the diviner faces, divination in JinBang is an action against closure more than a calculation of determined fate. As an exercise of human agency based on the agency of words, Chou Chien stresses
on here and now more than why and how, whereas it also calls attention to a reinterpretation of history. Taking Chou Chien as a generative meaning-making and meaning grounding process both on the petitioner’s and the diviner’s sides, I follow a Bahktinian approach in describing the multivocality of oracular poems and the interactive process of selection and communication, and in taking Chou Chien as a responsive and communicative action. Emphasizing on the intertextuality of oracular poems, I will discuss the mosaic of quotations in poems and how the readers view the poems in reference of local drama. In the end, I will turn to a modern practice of lottery number guessing which employs a similar technique of text interpretation.

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates, please contact ktanaka@uchicago.edu

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please email Kathryn Tanaka at
ktanaka@uchicago.edu or Tomoko Seto at tseto@uchicago.edu