Events
Faculty of Arts: Colloquium Talk – Professor Lee Ou Fan Leo on “Chance Encounters in Modern Literature: a Reading Report”
28 Nov 2014
4 – 6 pm
G24, Arts and Humanities Hub, G/F, Fung King Hey Building
Professor Lee Ou Fan Leo
Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Culture
3943 7107
“This is not, strictly speaking, a report on research but rather on my recent reading experience in preparation for teaching, lecturing, and research — an experience which I can only call “chance encounters” with a number of literary texts within the circuits of late 19th and 20th century Chinese and world literature. These texts — some well-known (Lu Xun, Kafka, Joyce), some not so well known (Musil’s “The Man without Qualities”, Pessoa’s “History’s Disquiet”, Shi Tuo’s “Tales of Orchard Garden”) — unveil a dazzling landscape of artistic creativity and imaginative power that I have not expected to find. Why is it so? and how should we treat such a “serendipitous” legacy? Frankly I don’t exactly know. I’d like to share my preliminary thoughts with interested colleagues and students in the Faculty of Humanities in a spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry”.