May 7, 2015 (Thursday), 4:30-6:00 pm
CPD-2.37, Centennial Campus, HKU
English and Putonghua
Poetry as Evidence:
Fragmentation of Self and Discourse in the Nineteenth Century
有詩為證：十九世紀的角色扮演與話語的割裂
Fragmentation of Self and Discourse in the Nineteenth Century
有詩為證：十九世紀的角色扮演與話語的割裂
Speaker: Professor Xiaofei Tian 田曉菲 (Harvard University)
Moderator: Professor Shu-mei Shih 史書美
Late imperial Chinese culture was a theater culture, and the metaphor of theater had a large intellectual significance for social life. This talk argues that poetry writing became part of the cultural role-playing in the nineteenth century, and that the multiplicity of roles assumed by a member of the cultural elite, roles carefully kept apart from one another, demonstrates a strange self-dismemberment and the failure of the neo-Confucian vision of a unified self. How was this fragmentation manifested, and what did it mean for our understanding of Chinese literature?
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