MCLC: ACLA seminar on Cultural Capital

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Valerie Levan <vlevan at uchicago.edu>
Subject: ACLA seminar on Cultural Capital
*************************************************************

Dear colleagues,

For those of you attending ACLA's annual meeting in New York this weekend,
I'd like to draw your attention to our seminar:

Seminar, “Cultural Capital in an Era of Paradigm Shift: East Asian
Literature in the Early Twentieth Century”

Panel Description:

Throughout East Asia, the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the
twentieth century saw an attempt to counter imperialist encroachment by
mastering  “Western” knowledge.  This conscious attempt on the part of
intellectuals, politicians, and cultural workers to remake their cultures
led to an era of paradigm shift in which different groups vied with each
other for control of both imported and nascent domestic cultural capital.
In addition to their creative work, authors engaged in a relentless
activity of essay writing, reviewing, criticism, translation and personal
correspondence with foreign authors, for the express purpose of expanding
the limits of their national literary fields. This seminar will examine
the cultural marketplace of East Asia in the early twentieth century and
interrogate the processes by which various forms of cultural capital
accrued their value.  Questions to be considered include: how did
individual authors reevaluate their own cultural practice in light of
foreign models? How did new notions of gender and sexuality shape modern
romantic imaginaries? To what degree did modern notions of nationhood and
selfhood remain linked?  What role did other forms of capital (social,
political, economic) play in designating arbiters of taste? We invite
papers that critically investigate the situation of the artist and
intellectual in this transitional period. Possible topics might include
but are not limited to: the role of foreign text in East Asian writing,
comparative anthropological linguistics, theories of translation, and the
resonance of early twentieth-century cultural capital for later artistic
developments.
Organizers: Valerie Levan, University of Chicago; Hongjian Wang,
University of Arkansas

Day 1:
Luying Chen, Columbia College Chicago, “Yu Dafu’s Deconstruction of
Romantic Solitude”

Paolo Magagin, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, “English poetry is English
poetry, Chinese poetry is Chinese poetry. Yu Dafu’s theory and practice of
translation”

Hongjian Wang, University of Arkansas, “Yu Dafu: A Hesitant Pioneer of
“Body-Writing" in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature”

Valerie Levan, University of Chicago, “‘Nights of Spring Fever’:
Punishment and Freedom in Yu Dafu’s Short Story and Lou Ye’s Film”

 
Day 2:
Hitomi Yoshio, Florida International University, “In the Realm of the
Seventh Sense: Gender, Genre, and Global Imagination in Osaki Midori's
Writings”

Lingling Yao, U of I, Urbana-Champaign, “Translating ‘Birth Control’,
Constructing Female Sexuality: The Predicament of Chinese Male
Intellectuals in the 1920s”

Jin Feng, Grinnell College, “Good Cook, Strong Nation: Zeng Yi's Records
from the Kitchen”

Géraldine A. Fiss, University of Southern California, “Gazing at the New
Woman: Schnitzlerian Fin-de-Siècle Decadence and Expressionist Visuality
in Modernist Fiction of 1930’s Shanghai”

 
Day 3:
Nicolai Volland, National University of Singapore, “From the Bund to the
Left Bank: Chinese Creative Communities in Paris, 1925-1935”

Yoon Sun Yang, Boston University, “Sentimental Men and Cultural Capital in
1910s Korea”

Yucong Hao, University of Texas at Austin, “Literature as Method:
Regretful Farewell and Dazai Osamu’s Asianism”

 
respectfully,
Valerie Levan