ONLINE: Staley Lecture by Dr. Lucas Klein
This event is online. If you would like to attend please use the following Zoom link: https://asu.zoom.us/j/545738053
Frankenstein vs. Dracula: Romanticisms and the Ideologies of Poetry in Contemporary China
We have never stopped resurrecting and reanimating the monsters of Romanticism — even contemporary Chinese poetry’s interrelationship with world literature can be divided into terms set by Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula. Looking at a recent debate between poets Xi Chuan and Wang Ao, we'll examine the assumptions behind their disagreement and conclude that the latter represents the vampiric while the former represents the Frankensteinian. In other words, where Wang Ao wants poetry that sucks the blood of Romantic ideology, Xi Chuan is interested in creating what I call a Frankensteinian hybrid, to both absorb what he sees as the best of that ideology even as he combats it at its worst. Arguing for the ethics of hybridity, this talk will then address and analyze the Frankensteinian mode in contemporary Chinese poetry, with a close look at the translational poetics of Ouyang Jianghe and Zhai Yongming.
Speaker Bio
Lucas Klein (Ph.D. Yale) is a father, writer and translator. His scholarship and criticism have appeared in the monograph "The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness" (Brill, 2018), as well as in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR, PMLA, and other venues. His translation "Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan" (New Directions, 2012) won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize; other publications include his translations of the poetry of Mang Ke, "October Dedications" (Zephyr and Chinese University Press, 2018), and contributions to "Li Shangyin" (New York Review Books, 2018). His translations of the poetry of Duo Duo, forthcoming from Yale University Press, won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and he co-edited "Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs" (2019) with Maghiel van Crevel, downloadable for free from Amsterdam University Press. He is an associate professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.