Tuesday, November 12, 2013
195 College Avenue
Potluck - 6:00pm
Colloquium - 7:00pm
Dr. Emily Sun, Associate Professor, Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures
National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
"Topographies, Archaeologies, Genealogies: Comparative Literature between Past and Future"
Following recent reconsiderations of the discipline in the age of globalization, this
presentation will address the potential of comparative literature to rethink the terms
of a shared and common modernity and world culture by means of renewed attention
to heterogeneous linguistic and textual traditions. It will seek to elaborate this
potential by using as an example recent work on lyricism in the Chinese tradition that
aims to recover persistent patterns obscured by the pre-modern/modern as well as
colonial/post-colonial divides. It will reflect on how such recuperative work may shed
light on the valence and operations of lyricism in other traditions and thereby on
heterogeneous configurations of the common.
