EALCTalks! SPRING 2021

Friday, February 5th at 12 noon

Chris Elford, “Dissembling the Lyric Self: Style, Repertoire, and Interiority in Ruan Ji's 阮籍 (210— 263)  "Singing of my Innermost Feelings" ("Yonghuai" 詠懷)” 

I will give an account of the Wei dynasty (220—265) thinker and poet Ruan Ji's manipulation of the early lyric repertoire to produce a poetic style at once distinctively his own and yet untraceable to the historical author-figure standing behind his poems. Against the standard characterization of his 82-poem series "Singing of My Innermost Feelings" as some of the first in which a poet can be seen breaking out of the anonymous lyric tradition to speak in his own voice, I argue they index the loss of the dynastic institutions of rites and music. I read Ruan Ji's poems against the background of 1) changes in technologies of writing and textual media and 2) the contemporary discourse of character appraisal, which took speech, physiognomy, deportment, calligraphy, and literary writing as the outward signs of inner cultivation. 

Friday, February 19th at 12 noon

Kelvin Chi Leung Chan, “Cantonese at Cal: Pedagogy and Assessment” 

I will briefly introduce four Cantonese courses (Chinese 3A, 3B, 3X, 30X) in our department.  Contents of the talk include: (1) Introduction of textbooks and materials used in these classes; (2) Explanation of pronunciation pedagogy, especially on Cantonese vowels and tones for non-Chinese speakers; and (3) The advantages and disadvantages of some assessment formats through a showcase of students' projects. 

Friday, March 19th at 12 noon

Paula Varsano, “Knowing People and Being Known: The Lyric Subject in Traditional Chinese Poetry” 

Professor Varsano will introduce us to her forthcoming book, Knowing People and Being Known. 

Friday April 2nd at 4pm

Chelsea Ward, "Screening Senses: Nichirin,  the Shinkankakuha, and Extravisual Cinema."  

This talk uses director Kinugasa Teinosuke's 1925 film adaptation of Shinkankakuha founder Yokomitsu Riichi's debut historical novel Nichirin as an entry point into Japanese film theory and literary impressions of the cinema from the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that they were deeply enmeshed with sensory realms beyond the visual, even as cinema's radical new visuality is championed in these works. This adaptation of Nichirin, completed just prior to Kinugasa’s more famous Kurutta ippeiji (A Page of Madness, 1926), was subject to protest and censorship from right-wing groups, largely due to its depiction of a contested historical era seen as a challenge to the purity of imperial and national identity. I interpret it, alongside Shinkankakuha-adjacent writings on the viscerality of cinematic experience, as a sensuous exploration of historical alterity undertaken within the complicated perceptual matrix silent film offered its Japanese auteurs and audiences.