Departmental Seminar Series 2017/18 (Semester One)

First seminar

Speaker:

Dr. Eli Park Sorensen

Eli Park Sorensen (PhD, UCL) is assistant professor in The Department of English at Chinese University Hong Kong. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought, literary theory, and cultural studies.

Title:

Realism and Capital in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry

Abstract

In this paper, I want to argue that the current anti-globalist sentiment (e.g. the rise of right-wing populism) calls for a renewed engagement with literary realism, often vilified or ignored as an aesthetically significant form within today’s critical discourse. My main focus will be the realist novels of Rohinton Mistry, whose texts in many ways can be seen as a response to what Joseph Vogl — in his book The Specter of Capital (2010) — has described as the fictionalization of the global economic system. With financial tools like forwards, derivatives, options, swaps and so forth, the global market circulates — not objects or services — but price expectations and future conjectures. This trajectory has according to Vogl essentially de-realized the market. Mistry’s novels generate what I call a ‘realist ideal’ that strives towards re-anchoring a world system that increasingly has become unreal, spectral. Literary realism, on a more general note, plays a crucial aesthetic function in terms of its worldliness, its interpretive and connecting energies, its consensus-seeking ethos, its formal dynamic as a ‘total’ and ‘un-transcendable’ horizon; as a formal aesthetic that is not simply ‘mirroring’ the market — that is, reflecting or imitating a postmodern regime of floating signifiers — but instead attempting to delineate critical genealogies that offer alternative perspectives on today’s anti-global sentiments.

Date: 25 October 2017 (Wednesday)

Time: 12:00-13:30

Venue: A-3/F-06

Second seminar (Cancelled)

Speaker:

Dr. Adam Schwartz

Dr. Adam Schwartz holds a doctorate degree from the University of Chicago with a specialization in Chinese and advanced training in Egyptian language and civilization. Prior to coming to Hong Kong Baptist University in 2016, he held positions at NYU and Yale. His main area of specialization is Early China, especially oracle bones, bronzes, and manuscripts from the Shang dynasty through the Qin-Han periods. His first book The Huayuanzhuang East Oracle Bone Inscriptions——A Study and Complete Annotated Translation will be available in early 2018 from De Gruyter (Berlin).

Title:

Two turtles and a bag of cinnabar: Highlights from Recently Discovered Oracle Bone Inscriptions

Abstract:

The Huayuanzhuang East oracle bones, first discovered in 1991 and completely published in six folio volumes in 2003, are a synchronically compact and unified corpus of 2452 individual divination accounts inscribed on 529 (345 completely intact) turtle shells and bovine scapulae that were produced during the late Shang period (ca. 1250-1045) under the patronage of a prince of the royal family. These princely communications are one of the most important epigraphic finds in the history of Chinese archaeology, and are now the prototype for corpus-based and scientific approaches to oracle bone study. My lecture will present an overview of this new discovery and highlight a couple of meaningful inscriptions to read with the audience.

Date: 15 November 2017 (Wednesday)

Time: 12:00-13:30

Venue: A-3/F-06

Third seminar

Speaker:

Dr. Yvonne Wong  

Dr. Wong just received her PhD from the University of Durham this summer and is a lecturer in cultural studies and literature at the community college, City University of Hong Kong.

Title:

Sound as Space, Space of Sound: Sound-Space dynamics in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage

Abstract

‘Can the body, with its capacity for action, and its various energies, be said to create space?’ The answer this paper offers belongs to the affirmative: It argues that the acoustic-spatial dynamics depicted in Dorothy Richardson’s thirteen-volume novel sequence, Pilgrimage, are productive and affective, shaping not only the spaces in the text, but elevating it as an acoustic construct in itself. By engaging with the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Merleau-Ponty, and many others, the paper commences with an exploration of how the presence of sounds, as well as our bodily perception of them, can collaborate and create aural architecture. It then proceeds to illuminate how the material contexts that constitute such sonic phenomena determine the attributes and the affective prowess of the acoustic space erected, on both the material spaces and the protagonist, Miriam Henderson. This sound discussion concludes with approaching Pilgrimage as an acoustic architecture as a whole.

Date: 6 December 2017 (Wednesday)

Time: 12:00-13:30

Venue: A-3/F-06