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About the lecture
The Internet has become a new mode of distribution for drama series in China. Television is no longer the primary venue of showing; increasingly, drama series are launched online for both domestic and international viewing, with English subtitles.
This lecture offers an overview of the rise of the Internet for drama series and focuses on a few case studies, including Royal Nirvana 鶴唳華亭 and The Untamed 陳情令. My analysis of these two series explores the »Classical Style« of the former and the homoerotic dynamics in the latter.
It is foreseeable that Internet drama has become—and will remain—the mainstream of the genre. An understanding of how it has evolved will help us understand its future development.

About the speaker
Michelle Yeh is Distinguished Professor of Chinese and Affiliated Faculty of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. A prolific scholar, translator, and editor, she has been the leading researcher in the field of modern Chinese-language poetry for the last few decades.

About the lecture series
In recent years, literary and cultural works that evoke the cultural memories of classical Chinese traditions are gaining popularity in the global Sinitic-languages space and cyberspace. From literary to visual culture, from pop music to fashion, from state policies to daily rituals, these classicist articulations present Chineseness as complicated, multifaceted, multilingual, and cross-cultural. They raise important questions on the relevance of Chinese traditions today to China, to global Chinese communities, and to a future of »world literature«—as Goethe envisioned it nearly two centuries ago. In this multiannual lecture series, prominent scholars, writers, and artists will present fascinating case studies from their research or draw upon their aesthetic practices to elaborate on their understanding on these important questions. Such investigations demonstrate the abundant aesthetic and intellectual resources that the vast repertoire of Chinese cultural memories may provide to engage in a dialogue on the present and future of a global culture.

Concept of the lecture series: Zhiyi Yang, Professor of Sinology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften