David Der-wei Wang Lecture | Sinophone Classicism Lecture Series

Zhiyi Yang Announcement
Location
Germany
Subject Fields
Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Chinese History / Studies, East Asian History / Studies, Literature, Popular Culture Studies

In recent years, literary and cultural works that evoke the cultural memories of classical Chinese traditions are gaining popularity in the global Sinophone space and cyberspace. From literary to visual culture, from pop music to fashion, from state policies to daily rituals, these classicist articulations present Chineseness as complicated, multifaceted, multilingual, and cross-cultural.

The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften is dedicating the lecture series »Sinophone Classicism: Chinese Cultural Memories in a Global Space« to exploring these contemporary forms of expression. We invite prominent scholars, writers, and artists to present case studies from their research or to reflect upon their aesthetic practices. The lecture series is conceptualized and organized by Zhiyi Yang, Professor of Sinology at Goethe University, who is currently Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften.

In the forthcoming winter semester, our distinguished speakers include David Der-wei Wang, Yang Lian, Marius Meinhof, Jeroen de Kloet, and Markus Nornes. All lectures are online or hybrid

The inaugural lecture by the distinguished Prof. David Der-wei Wang will take place on October 28, at 16:00 CET (10am Boston, 7am California, 10pm Beijing/Taipei).

To register for the online lectures, please click: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMvcemgqD4pHtwbv3Xm1wsOHWP42K7I_RkN

To register for the presence events (lecture+reception), please write to:

<anmeldung@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de> (contact person: Beate Sutterlüty)

Please kindly share the announcement also in your institute, department, and interested research groups. 

 

Overview of the speakers, dates, and topics:

October 28, 2021

David Der-wei Wang (Harvard University)

A Story of the Red Bean:

On Classicist Poetics and Modern Crisis

(Online Lecture)

This lecture explores the reverberations between Chinese intellectuals and classicist poetry through modern times, particularly at moments of national cataclysm. The case study centers on Chen Yinque (1890–1969), “the most talented historian in modern China.” I look into Chen’s legendary acquisition of a red bean during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which purportedly initiated the poetic turn of his scholarship in the subsequent decades. Chen’s engagement with and composition of classicist poetry in the socialist era compels us to question the dialectic between modernity and monstrosity, the tenability of affective evocation (xing), and the latitude of creative freedom. The lecture will also refer to Chen’s imaginary dialogues with figures such as Wang Guowei (1877–1927), Qian Zhongshu (1910–1998), and Yu Ying-shih (1930–2021).

 

November 26, 2021

YANG Lian (Poet)

A Tower Built Downward:

The Creative Transformation of Chinese Classical Lyric Aesthetics

(Hybrid)

The aesthetics of classical Chinese poetry is a holistic conceptual construct consisting of multiple dimensions—philosophical, stylistic, and linguistic, among others. Its lyric forms are deeply rooted in the visuality, musicality, and imagistic associations of the Chinese language. Since the twentieth century, foreign (Western par excellence) concepts have been introduced en masse into the Chinese language, creating a potential split between characters (zi) and words (ci), which in classical written Chinese are often identical. Modern Chinese freestyle poetry is built upon this linguistic reality. Contemporary Sinophone poets thus need extra caution to navigate this landscape of deep crises. The “tower” of contemporary poetic writing is thus by necessity built downward, seeking inspirations from the autochthon tradition to answer our urgent existential questions. The target is to recreate a kind of classicist lyric aesthetics by “thinking through poetry” and to converge traditions—modern as well as classical, Chinese as well as foreign—in the depth of philosophical reflections. This creative transformation of Chinese classical lyric aesthetics is itself an epic of intellectual adventures.

 

December 17, 2021

Marius Meinhof (University of Bielefeld)

Piety without Obedience?

Popular Discourse on Filial Piety in Contemporary China

(Hybrid)

This presentation will introduce findings from an ongoing research project on discourses on filial piety (xiao 孝) and traditional morality in contemporary China. In the context of an aging society and discourses on moral decay in the reform era and informed by a new wave of nostalgia for traditional culture, the concept of filial piety has gained new popularity in Chinese discourse today. Concerns with filial piety as a resource for morality are visible in state discourse and social engineering projects, but they go far beyond the realm of the state: within families as well as between peers of same age, intergenerational relations are understood and contested by invoking various definitions of filial piety. Interpretations range from demands for unconditional piety towards parents, over ideas of “piety without obedience” (xiao er bu shun 孝而不顺), to a rejection of “stupid piety” (yuxiao 愚孝), or even a flat-out rejection of filial piety as feudal and backward. Within this wide field of interpretations, intergenerational roles, mutual obligations, as well as boundaries between conjugal couples and their parents are constantly negotiated and re-interpreted. At the same time, filial piety is often extended to wider social circles through claims such as that even outside of the family, a truly filial person would not bring shame to one’s parents.

 

January 21, 2022

Jeroen de Kloet (University of Amsterdam)

From Platform to Lying Flat:

Youth, Technology, Hipsters, and the Question of Chineseness

(Hybrid)

The past two decades in China are somehow characterized by a simultaneous opening up and closing off of the country. Chinese youth cultures particularly reflect such paradoxical movement. On the one hand, the rise of a hipster culture—the scene of “cultured youth” (wenyi qingnian 文艺青年) dressed in long cotton dresses or trousers with straw hats, writing letters or postcards by hand and preferably with a fountain pen, listening to folk music, and strolling through the country side—resonates with the global proliferation of likeminded cultural scenes. On the other hand, the popularity of the Han-ethnic clothing style (the hanfu 汉服 movement), calligraphy, and traditional Chinese characters among the youth attests to a move towards, say, more “Chineseness.” Meanwhile, all these cultured youth are frantically busy taking pictures and selfies with their mobile phones to subsequently post on social media platforms like Weibo and Tik Tok. In my talk, I will engage with the role of such platforms in the articulation of youth identities in China, and show how both “global” as well as “local” cultural articulations are always highly promiscuous. In the recent “lying flat” (tangping 躺平) movement, I read a possible way out of the demand to be and become both global and Chinese, as imposed today on Chinese youth identities.

 

February 10, 2022

Markus Nornes (University of Michigan)

Translating Calligraphy

(Hybrid)

Calligraphy and cinema have an intimate relationship in East Asia. Indeed, the ubiquity of the brushed word in cinema is one element that actually ties works in Korean, Japanese and Sinophone Asia together as a regional cinema. On first glance, cinema and calligraphy would appear as radically different art forms. On second glance, they present themselves as sister arts. Both are art forms built from records of the human body moving in (an absent) time and space. How does one adequately subtitle a calligraphic script, attaching the dead letter of Helvetica to a linguistic text whose visual materiality is so spectacularly central to meaning making? How does investigating this very problem lead us to rethinking the nature of the cinematic subtitle, which is very much alive―a truly movable type?

 

Contact Information
Contact Email
anmeldung@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de