Two giants of the Chinese literary and cultural scene promote East-West literature studies at CityU book launch party
Two giants of the Chinese literary and cultural scene promote East-West literature studies at CityU book launch party
Two giants of contemporary Chinese literary and cultural studies will be giving talks at a book launch on 6 February (Tuesday) at City University of Hong Kong (CityU). The launch kicks off a series of celebrated lectures on Chinese and Western literature to be held throughout this month.
The launch is for Unexpected Affinities by Professor Zhang Longxi, Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation in the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics.
The highly-popular and widely-published cultural commentator Professor Leo Oufan Lee, Professor of Chinese Emeritus at Harvard University and Professor of Humanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, will be the guest speaker at the launch.
Professor Lee is an active intellectual in the modern Chinese cultural scene. He publishes in both English and Chinese and contributes to various journals and magazines, including the weekly magazine Yazhou Zhoukan, or Asia Weekly.
Unexpected Affinities is an expanded version of the talks that Professor Zhang gave as part of the prestigious Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 2005. He was the first scholar from outside Europe and North America to deliver the Alexander Lectures, which have been delivered annually since 1929 and are considered one of the most distinguished lectureships in literary studies in North America.
“This will be the first time I have delivered my Alexander Lectures in Hong Kong,” said Professor Zhang, who joined an illustrious line of academics, including Terry Eagleton (2004), Toni Morrison (2002) and Julia Kristeva (1999), who have given the Lectures. “It has been a tremendous honour to be included among these distinguished scholars,” he said.
In Unexpected Affinities, Professor Zhang reviews thematic and conceptual similarities that unite literary and cultural traditions in the East and West by emphasizing affinity over difference and exploring the relationship between the East and West in terms of cultural variations, challenging the traditional boundaries of West-centred comparative literature as a discipline.
“By comparing literatures, we achieve a different perspective and acquire a new sensibility that allows us greater insight and something more than just a single point of view,” Professor Zhang said.
The four-part series of lectures, to be held on 6, 9, 12 and 14 February, and delivered by Professor Zhang, will examine the idea of cultural incommensurability, cross-cultural conceptual metaphors and symbols and unexpected similarities within texts and ideas across cultures of the East and West.
About Professor Zhang Longxi
Professor Zhang has an MA from Peking University and a PhD from Harvard. He is a leading scholar in East-West comparative studies of literature and culture and has served as a consultant on the Committee for the Study of Research Doctorate Programmes in the US under the National Research Council, on the review panel of the University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, and fellowship review panels in Taiwan.
About Professor Leo Oufan Lee
Professor Leo Lee was educated at the National Taiwan University (BA) and
Harvard (PhD). He has taught in many universities, including the Chinese
University of Hong Kong, the University of Chicago, the University of
California, Los Angeles, and Harvard. He is a leading scholar in the study
of modern Chinese literature and culture.
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For more information, please contact Michael Gibb (6308 0173/ 3442 6121) or Catherine Ng (9036 4296/ 3442 6802) of the Communications Office at City University of Hong Kong.