• ‘Thus Began Outrage from Liveless Things’: Nature’s Hostile Turn in Milton’s Paradise Lost

    Room CRT-7.58, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Miles Link - Department of English, Fudan University Abstract After Adam and Eve’s temptation in John Milton’s biblical epic Paradise Lost, the Earth is drastically altered to reflect humans’ fallen state. The planet is knocked off its axis, animals turn on one another, and the character of existence itself changes: from now on, life on […]

  • A Challenge to the fin de siècle poem: Four alternative fin de siècle poets – Hardy, Field, Meynell, Kipling

    Room CRT-7.58, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Professor Isobel Armstrong - Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-staff/emeritus-staff/isobel-armstrong) Abstract Generally dominated by the Aesthetic Movement and Decadent poets, mainly male, in critical discussion, I suggest that late nineteenth-century poetry was more varied and experimental than our customary frameworks suggest. I work with late-century Darwin to provide another model for […]

  • Englishes, English Creoles and their Negative Indefinites

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Professor Johan van der Auwera - Department of Linguistics, University of Antwerp (https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/johan-vanderauwera/my-website/) Abstract The talk reports on a typological study of negative indefinites, i.e., the counterparts to standard English nobody and nothing, in Englishes, primarily the New Englishes, and in English Creoles. Particular attention goes to "Negative Concord" ("NC"), i.e., the exponence of negation through both a […]

  • Filial Power

    by Dr. Arifani Moyo (Royal Holloway University of London)

  • Saying and Renunciation in Chang Chung-yuan’s Commentary to the Dao De Jing

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Johan Siebers - Religious Studies Unit, Middlesex University London (https://www.mdx.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-directory/profile/siebers-johan) Abstract One of the most conspicuous aspects of the Dao De Jing is its negative view of language. Language is unable to express the full nature of being, the Dao, which is, rather, open only to an intuitive, direct and ineffable, spontaneous and creative […]

  • International Colloquium: Philosophies of Communication – East and West

    Seminar Room 745, 7/F Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong

    Additional Content Organizers: Adrian Pablé (HKU) and Johan Siebers (Middlesex University) This international colloquium explores aspects of language philosophy with a focus on the relation between Eastern and Western paradigms. Contributions can be historical, philosophical, literary, linguistic, or related to media/communication, but all in one way or another connected to the question if and how the […]

  • Literary Realism in the Anthropocene

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Adeline Johns-Putra - School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey (https://www.surrey.ac.uk/englishandlanguages/staff_list/complete_staff_list/adeline_johnsputra/) Abstract Some have recently argued that the age we now call the Anthropocene demands new understandings of human ontology and thus of history. I ask what such a renewed sense of history might mean for literary realism, invested as it is in […]