世界文学中道德与生死的联系

主讲人：

Professor Charles Stanley Ross (Purdue University)

主持人：

谷红丽教授（华南师范大学外文学院）

 

Professor Charles Stanley Ross

2001-2018年任普渡大学比较文学系主任，英文系教授，意大利富布莱特学者，普渡大学荣誉教授。本科毕业于哈佛大学，博士毕业于芝加哥大学英文系。主要研究方向包括：英国文艺复兴文学、意大利浪漫主义史诗、世界文学与比较文学。

学术成果：Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare (2019); Arcadia Sir Philip Sidney (2016); Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace (2009); Lectura Dantis: Purgatorio (2008); The Thebaid: Seven against Thebes (2004); Lectura Dantis: Inferno (1999); Fortune and Romance: Boiardo 1994 in America (1998); The Custom of the Castle from Malory to Macbeth (1997); Orlando Innamorato (1989). He is now working on an introductory survey titled “Connecting Morality and Mortality in World Literature.”

讲座摘要：

From Homer to Hemingway, Confucius to Dante, issues of right and wrong often appear in world literature alongside the problem of what it means to die and whether there’s an afterlife. The curious way authors often link morality to mortality necessarily raises the question of whether it’s possible to lack either one. A moral void is not an easy state of affairs to keep in mind, since as Augustine points out in his Confessions, even a thief prefers not to be stolen from. Nor is immortality an easy thing to picture. Despite the difficulty, it is curious how often authors link these two ideas. The result is an uncertain, sometimes vaguely magical, interplay between morality and morality from the earliest literature to today.

讲座 2   

Re-reading Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ on Its Bicentenary

济慈《秋颂》二百年：重读浅论

主讲人：

李鸥副教授 （香港中文大学）

    

凌海衡教授（华南师范大学外文学院）

 

李鸥教授

香港中文大学英文系副教授；曾先后任教于北京外国语大学英语系、北京大学英语系。毕业于北京外国语大学（本科、硕士)、美国Wake Forest大学（硕士)、香港中文大学（博士)。受邀在日本东京大学、德国慕尼黑大学、英国圣安德鲁斯大学及国内多所大学讲学。英国济慈基金研究会会员、澳亚浪漫主义协会亚洲负责人。主要研究方向为英国浪漫主义、中英比较文化研究等。

学术成果：“Romantic, Rebel, and Reactionary: The Metamorphosis of Byron in Twentieth-Century China” (British Romanticism in Asia, 2019); “Two Chinese Wordsworths: The Reception of Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century China” (Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts, 2019); “Keats, Sextus Empiricus, and Medicine” (Romanticism 22: 2, 2016); Keats and Negative Capability (2009)

 

This paper proposes to re-read Keats’s last great ode in connection with Hume’s mitigated scepticism. Placing the poem against the long journal letter Keats wrote to George and Georgiana on 17-27 September 1819, it will explore how the poem negotiates the metaphysical with the physical, the historical with the personal, and the artful with the natural. Inspired by the poet’s daily walk and immediate surrounding, the poem conveys the quiet power of common life, in the same way that Hume suggests that the metaphysical reasoning of excessive scepticism will vanish in the presence of daily occupation and real objects. A poem on the constant flux in the natural world and human life and no less on historical mutations, it shies away from discursive abstraction from the actual seasonal change and consequent sceptical thinking. Composed amidst Keats’s doubt about his poetic vocation and resolution to take up journalistic writing, the ode is retrospective of his poetic career yet in the least self-referential manner. With the effacement of the self in its evocative language, its removal of the dialectical impulses in the spring odes, and its non-Miltonic Englishness, the autumnal ode embodies a temperate scepticism in its own music.

讲座 3  

Air, Freedom, and Finitude: Some Paths of Association

空气，自由及有限性：一些关联的路径

主讲人：

Professor Haun Saussy (University of Chicago)

主持人：

黄海容副教授（华南师范大学外文学院）

Professor Haun Saussy

芝加哥大学终身教授。本科毕业于杜克大学希腊语与比较文学系，硕士与博士毕业于耶鲁大学比较文学系。曾任教于加州大学洛杉矶分校，斯坦福大学，耶鲁大学，香港城市大学，法国巴黎三大，新西兰Otago大学，2011年开始执教于芝加哥大学。分别担任过斯坦福大学及耶鲁大学比较文学系系主任，2009-2011年任美国比较文学协会主席。研究兴趣主要涉及东亚文学史，庄子及相关文本的接受研究，诗学和翻译，人权及全球健康问题等。

 

学术成果：Are We Comparing Yet? On Standards, Justice, and Incomparability (2019)；Translation as Citation, or Zhuangzi Inside Out (2018); The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and its Technologies  (2016); Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader (2010); Sinographies: Writing China (2005); Comparative Literature in an Era of Globalization (2004); Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (2001); The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1993)

 

The separation of the humanities from the sciences is a relatively recent development, and crises such as pandemic disease and impending climate change urge us to bring them back in closer contact, as they were during the Enlightenment in Europe. Some literary scholars have formed a new field—ecopoetics or ecocriticism—with the aim of repairing the gap. While acknowledging the existence of that field, this lecture will follow a different method: philology, or the history of words. For language is the vehicle of concepts, and by using words we change their meaning, either starkly or subtly. By retracing the history of the concept “atmosphere” in French, the language where new meanings for that word were pioneered between 1630 and 1770, we can discover aspects of the history of other significant ideas—among them, freedom, equality, and the right to a decent life, which can be summarized in our troubled era as “the right to breathe.” 

讲座 4  

Differential Belonging, Motile Text: Revisiting James Joyce’s Ulysses

差异性归属与移动文本：再探詹姆斯·乔伊斯的《尤利西斯》

Professor Sanja Bahun (University of Essex）

 

胡宝平副教授（华南师范大学外文学院）

 

 

Professor Sanja Bahun

英国埃塞克斯大学文学、电影与戏剧研究系教授，埃塞克斯大学研究生院院长，英国比较文学学会（BCLA）执委会成员，英文权威学术期刊Modernism/ Modernity与Feminist Modernist Studies编委会成员，现代主义研究协会 (MSA) 年度最佳出版物评审委员会成员。本科毕业于贝尔格莱德大学，硕士与博士毕业于罗格斯大学比较文学系。研究兴趣涉及国际现代主义文学、世界文学、电影研究、心理分析与女性、性别研究等领域。目前承担莱弗休姆基金（Leverhulme Trust）资助研究项目 “现代主义文学与家园观念”。

 

主要专著及编著：Thinking Home: Interdisciplinary Dialogues (2018)；Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917-1989: Re-Visions (2014)；Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (2013)；Modernism and Melancholia:  Writing as Countermourning (2013)；Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions (2012)；Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras (2011)；From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production (2009)；Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (2008)；The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism (2006)

 

Home is a focal point around which mental and material activities such as belonging, memory, migration, emplacement and displacement, revolve. As a concept, experience, emotion, and a historically contingent discourse, home shapes who we are as individuals and collectives. At once material and produced through the acts of imagination, home, just like the associated condition of community, is haunted by the paradox of boundaries—that is, the propensity to simultaneously assert and relinquish sovereignty. This ambivalence at the heart of home and community creates a space for the writer’s reflection and action, that is, for not only sanctioning but also questioning the accepted visions of home/ homeland in text. Joyce, I propose in this lecture, rewrote the classical text of home-seraching and homecoming to battle the historical upsurge of the static territorial discourse of home in the early twentieth century. This recourse to the assumedly non-territorial, non-boundary principles of mythic/ primordial home and the narratives of patri-and matrilineage is paired with the dynamic representation of material home itself across varied scales and chronotopic sites of Ulysses. Thus Joyce’s redeployment of the mythic home—just like Georg Lukács’s, Sigmund Freud’s and Franz Kafka’s—emphatically denies us the possibility of ever returning to that primary site, yet, similarly to Constantine Cavafy’s, it does not collapse into the mourning of lost home. What is the relationship between this careful balancing of affects, Joyce’s controversial appropriation of female voice in “Penelope,” and the new epistemology of home that emerges as one approaches the closure of the text? Prompted by the desire to read anew the performance of alternative gender affiliation in the concluding episode of Joyce’s Ulysses and to connect the preceding scholarly accounts of Joyce, cosmopolitanism, and gender with contemporary insights about differential home-communities, this lecture strives to answer these questions about Joyce’s vision of home.

 

华南师范大学外国语言文化学院

华南师范大学外国文学与文化研究中心