EVENT DETAILS

Frantically Roaming: Nora, Lu Xun and Eileen Chang

Speaker: Hu Ying (Professor of East Asian Studies, UCI)
Discussant: Mei Li Inouye (Assistant Professor of Chinese, Centre College)

This talk imagines a dialogue between Lu Xun and Eileen Chang, usually believed to belong to diametrically opposing camps, political vs. apolitical, left vs. right, feminist vs. feminine. It begins with Lu Xun’s “What Happens after Nora Walks Out” and compares his conception of this iconic New Woman with a few of his male “roamers.” It then examines a subset of Eileen Chang’s works that feature female characters from old elite families who awaken to the stifling environment of their homes and struggle to “walk out.” The paper argues that the concerns of Lu Xun and Eileen Chang converge more often than not, in their trenchant social critique as well as in the ways their celebrated realism unfolds into allegories of modern Chinese history. The points of their divergence provide us a window into the gendered positioning of each writer and their respective response to the formation of modern subjectivity. In putting the two greats of modern Chinese literature side by side, the goal of this talk is to think with them on the conditions, limitations and pitfalls of the modern individual, whose “walking out” serves as a foundational metaphor of her agency and modernity.

This colloquium series is organized by the UCHRI Syncopating East Asia Multi-campus Working Group (2020-21) for in-depth paper feedback and discussion on reflexive methods and frameworks of writing East Asia and its cultural dynamics with the rest of the world. Feel free to direct questions to Shiqi Lin (shiql11@uci.edu).

Zoom: Please click here to register. https://uci.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMuf-ysqDsiG9fNgMtWB9KLUFymQRTkL_5X