EALCTalks! Fall 2021

Friday, September 24, noon to 1pm, 287 Dwinelle Hall:  

Matt Wild, “Battle Hymns of the Chinese Romantic: Huang Jingren's "Nao Songs" 鐃歌 on the Second Jinchuan War”

 This talk presents material from my dissertation exploring the social forms of poetic culture in eighteenth-century China. I will discuss a series of strange, archaizing battle hymns submitted to the Qianlong emperor by none other than Huang Jingren, a figure whom Republican-era literary modernizers eagerly imagined as the hero of an indigenous strain of Romanticism, China's very own poète maudit. These battle hymns and the circumstances surrounding their submission, I suggest, allow us to see beyond the shadow of the early twentieth-century conceptions through which eighteenth-century poetry is usually understood, offering a new perspective on the possibilities for "literature" at the height of the Qing empire.

 Friday, October 15 at 4pm PST (via Zoom): 

Jiaqian Zhu, “On Touch: Sensing the Haptic Beauty in Kawabata Yasunari's Palm-ofthe-Hand Stories” 

Among the human senses, the haptic sense is the most elusive: hard to describe in language, but always multisensory. Modernist theorists like Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) have observed new sensational experiences and the haptic transfomation in the early twentieth century. This presentation attempts to explore the interplay of the haptic sense and literary modernism in the palm-length stories of a Japanese modernist writer Kawabata Yasunari. Drawing on scholarship on the New Sensationalist School and haptic modernism, this project attempts ask the following questions: How does literary texts perform as an organ of the haptic sense that transmits the fundamental condition of nerve-endings? How does Kawabata produce a visceral writing of the self via the skin? How does film theory shed light on earlier avant-garde gestures of intermediality in 1920s Japan? 

Friday, November 5, noon-1pm, 287 Dwinelle Hall: 

Jonathan Zwicker, Mapping Tokyo, circa 1890 

This talk will examine the ways in which the fiction of late nineteenth-century Japan came to be shaped by a series of infrastructure reforms instituted in 1889 in an attempt to modernize the city of Tokyo. 

Friday December 3, 4pm PST (Via Zoom): 

Kyoko Takahara Ahn, “Exploring the Possibilities of Blended and Online Language Instruction” 

The pandemic challenged us to learn new teaching skills.  Our society has been changing, and so has our communication style.   Our language pedagogy strategies and course design need to evolve accordingly.  Kyoko Takahara Ahn will share her experiences with remote teaching and discuss the affordances of blended and online language pedagogy.  The goal of this talk is that we, as educators, explore together the best pedagogical practices for diversity and inclusion for our students to help carry us through the 21st-century.