The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events

Registration and participation
Participation on spot
Venue: Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg

Please register:
anmeldung@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de

Participation via Zoom
For the Zoom registration link, please click here

About the lecture
This talk will rethink and redefine the concept of the avant-garde in contemporary P.R.C. literature with regards to the emergence of variegated literary practices in the cyber space in the recent years. Focusing on the example of Chen Chuncheng (b.1990), an up-and-coming novelist who first started writing on Douban (an online platform for culture enthusiasts), this talk will explore how the classical Chinese traditions have been invoked to reimagine the temporality of literary creations.

About the speaker
Fangdai Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of Chinese at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Chen’s current research focuses on global modernism and avant-garde studies, and she mainly works with materials in Chinese, English, French, and Japanese.

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