Speakers

East Asia and Future Directions of Comparative Literature
Spring, 2004

All members of the Princeton University as well as scholars and students from other institutions are welcome to "East Asia and Future Directions of Comparative Literature." The lectures will begin at 4:30, with a question and answer period at the end. Audience members are invited to the reception following each lecture.

	March 5 Friday	Masao Miyoshi, "The Prospect of the Humanities (including Comparative Literature)" 4:30 McCosh Hall Room 60 — reception in East Pyne Room 127 Moderated by Richard Okada, Princeton University Currently at the Department of Literature, University of California at San Diego, Masao Miyoshi has been and continues to be a controversial and prominent figure in Japanese studies and in the American academy in general. Some of his recent work include reflections on the humanities in an increasingly capitalist university: “Ivory Tower in Escrow,” boundary 2 (2000); and “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality,” Comparative Literature (2001). A list of his work may be found at his homepage at UCSD.
	March 23 Tuesday	Haun Saussy, "For Comparison's Sake: East Asian Literatures as Exception and as Rule" 4:30 McCosh Hall Room 60 — reception in Chancellor Green 107 Moderated by Thomas Hare, Princeton University Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies warns its readers that Haun Saussy is "not for the faint of heart." Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, Saussy is one of the most fascinating voices in East-West studies, remarkable for his versatility and originality. His book, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1993), has won the prestigious René Wellek prize. Among his recent works, a small sample might include: “Comparative Literature?” PMLA 118.2 (2003): 336-341; “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté: The Surprises of Applied Structuralism,” 39-71 in Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary Theory (2003); and “No Time Like the Present: The Category of Contemporaneity in Chinese Studies,” 35-54 in Early China /Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons (2002). His homepage offers a comprehensive list of his numerous publications, and includes links to his contribution to the ACLA 2003 Report on the State of the Discipline and to his collaborative art project called The Rosetta Screen.
	April 1 Thursday	Christopher L. Hill, "Comparative Literature, World Systems, and the 'Specialist'" 4:30 Chancellor Green 105 - Reception in Chancellor Green 103 Moderated by Jonathan Abel, Princeton University An assistant professor at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures of Yale University, Christopher Hill is a young scholar in the fields of interdisciplinary and intercultural studies. His unique perspective provides a look not only at the global place of Japanese literature, but also at the institutional practices of negotiating the artificial, but real, departmental and intellectual boundaries that continue to burden the comparatist. He has written on East-West comparison in “National Histories and World Systems: Writing Japan, France, the United States,” in Turning Points in Historiography: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (2002); and “Fashizumu to hyôshô no shutai— Maruyama, Adoruno, yûtopia [Fascism and the Subject of Representation: Maruyama, Adorno , Utopia],” Hihyô kûkan (Tokyo) II: 4 (1995). His curriculum vitae details other aspects of his work.
	April 13 Tuesday	Christopher Bush, "The Other of the Other: 'East Asia' as Comparative Literature" 4:30 Chancellor Green 105 - Reception in Chancellor Green 103 Moderated by Kevin Tsai, Princeton University A member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University (see announcement), Christopher Bush is one of the new voices in the blooming research on East Asian art and literature in European and American Modernism. He received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California-Los Angeles, with a dissertation entitled Ideographies: Figures of Chinese Writing in Modern Western Aesthetics (2000). After teaching as a visiting assistant professor at Indiana University, he joined Princeton this past fall. His current projects include a collaborative translation and critical edition in English of Victor Segalen’s French/Chinese prose poem collection Stèles. His publications include “Theory and Its Double: Ideology and Ideograph in Orientalist Theory,” Paroles gelées 12(1994); “‘L’Orient de l’esprit’: Writing and the Orient in ‘Le Yalou’,” Bulletin des études valéryennes 76-77(1997).

 

Locations

The first two talks will take place in McCosh Hall, Room 60, through Entry 6. Built in 1906, McCosh was designed by Raleigh C. Gildersleeve in the Tudor Gothic style common to much of the campus. With a handsome exterior of Indiana limestone, it houses the English Department and is a center for research and learning. An interactive campus map may be found here by courtesy of the Princeton University website, which also offers travel directions to campus.

The next two talks will take place in the newly renovated Chancellor Green, which is connected to East Pyne, the home building of the Department of Comparative Literature. To the left is an 1876 drawing of what used to be called the Chancellor Green Library.

 

 

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