Events
Upcoming Events
Campus Talks
Friday, Nov. 10
Campus talks by Jack W. Chen, Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia.
"Weirdness"
12–2:50 p.m.
Walls Lounge, Elaine Langone Center, Room 213
Lunch provided, RSVP will be posted in the message center
This talk will discuss the emergence of weird tales during medieval China (200–600 CE) when we start to see anecdotes about foxes, ghosts, divine maidens, weretigers and seductive reptiles. Although medieval weird stories are not seen as fictional, neither are they comfortably within the historiographic domain. By examining a selection of weird stories, I will argue that it is precisely weirdness that allows for the possibility of fiction.
"The Ontology of the Ghost"
5–6 p.m.
Arches Lounge, Elaine Langone Center, Room 304
Light refreshments
A ghost is usually understood to be the returned spirit of the dead, but it is in the question of the return that we might ask what is the being of the ghost and how the ghost comes to be present. My talk will begin with early attempts in the Chinese tradition to delineate the nature of the ghost and then to turn the mediated ontology of the ghost: how the ghost is both made present and effects presence through media forms and technologies, from poetry to telegraphy to cinema.