Cosmopolitanism and the Internationalization of Contemporary Chinese Literature

Date
Thu April 5th 2018, 4:15 - 5:45pm
Event Sponsor
Center for East Asian Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Location
East Asia Library, Room 224, 518 Memorial Way
Cosmopolitanism and the Internationalization of Contemporary Chinese Literature
Speaker: Wang Ning - Changjiang Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Tsinghua University

Free and open to the public.  Please RSVP here.

About the talk:

In the lecture, the speaker will first race the origin of cosmopolitanism in the West and its parallel relations with ancient Chinese philosophy and its practice in modern China. He will then offer a new construction of this controversial concept from a literary and cultural perspective. Wang argues that in current China’s academic circles, to talk about cosmopolitanism has become an academic fashion. But he will, mainly from a literary point of view, try to put modern and contemporary Chinese literature in a broad context of world literature. He will point out that the success of Mo Yan’s work lies mostly in his narration of the fundamental problems Chinese people are confronted with in a broad cosmopolitan context with regard to his wide human concerns. The same is true of other contemporary authors like Yan Lianke, Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, Ge Fei, and Liu Zhenyun, who are moving steadily from China toward the world.

About the speaker:

WANG Ning is Changjiang Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Tsinghua University and Zhiyuan Chair Professor of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. Apart from his 20 books and hundreds of articles in Chinese, he has authored two books in English: Globalization and Cultural Translation (2004), and Translated Modernities: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on Globalization and China (2010). He has also published extensively in English or edited special issues in such international prestigious journals as New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, Comparative Literature Studies, boundary 2, Modern Language Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, European Review, Neohelicon, Semiotica, ARIEL, ISLE, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Narrative, Telos, Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, and The Amerasia Journal.

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