Prof. Douglas Kerr - School of English, HKU (https://englishhkuhk.foarts.hku.hk/people/Faculty/150/Professor%20Douglas%20Kerr) Abstract Police states are "Orwellian". This paper reads George Orwell to ask what the police meant to him. It traces continuities in his representation of the police, from the imperial force with which he served in Burma in the 1920s, to the Spanish police from whom […]
Dr. Jessica Valdez - School of English, HKU (https://englishhkuhk.foarts.hku.hk/people/Faculty/64/Dr%20J.%20R.%20Valdez) Abstract Victorian commentators saw the sensation novel—a short-lived sub-genre of the 1860s known for its fast-paced plots drawn from real life—as symptomatic of the newspapers’ growing influence on the reading public. In a famous 1860 review, H. L. Manse conflated this new novelistic form – which […]
Tuesdays: October 11, 18, 25, November 1; Fridays: October 14, 21, 28, November 4
Dr. Alfie Bown - Hang Seng Management College (https://mst.hsu.edu.hk/en/) Abstract This paper discusses the relationship between literature and laughter, focusing not so much on representations of laughter nor on the role of laughter in literature, but on whether there may be a literary quality to laughter itself. Using examples from Kafka’s letters to his fiancé […]
Prof. Emeritus Eugene Eoyang - Indiana University Bloomington/Lingnan University (https://comparativeliterature.indiana.edu/people/eoyang.shtml) Abstract The study of the self has prompted many publications in the West in the last generation, but few studies examine the contrasting notions of the self in Asia and the West. In the West, the development of the self is regarded as essential to […]
Prof. Matias Martinez - Bergische Universität Wuppertal (https://www.ndlmm.uni-wuppertal.de/) Abstract In recent years narratologists have become increasingly aware of ways of telling stories that do not correspond to a narrow definition of narrative. Diverse phenomena such as ballets, games, buildings, gardens and lifes are now taken to tell stories. These ‚embodied‘ narratives challenge classical narratological concepts […]
Dr. Eli Park Sorensen - The Chinese University of Hong Kong (http://www.eng.cuhk.edu.hk/?page_id=1831) Abstract Since the Korean War (1950-1953), over half a million non-western children have been sent to western countries for transnational adoption — whereas there are very few examples of white children adopted to non-western countries by non-western populations. In my paper, I will […]
Prof. Adam Jaworski - School of English, HKU (https://englishhkuhk.foarts.hku.hk/people/Faculty/48/Professor%20Adam%20Jaworski) Abstract This talk is a preliminary, work-in-progress inquiry into the idea of writing as ‘spectacle’. I will discuss several examples of large scale, extravagant, immersive writing in art and public signage exemplifying three approaches to spectacle: ‘consumerist representation’ (Guy Debord), ‘visual pleasure’ (Laura Mulvey) and ‘grotesque […]
