2022-23 Visual Culture Seminar
Obsessed with Reading: Bovarysm as a Phenomenon in the Reception of Translated Love Stories in Early Twentieth-Century China
Professor Jane Qian Liu, University of Warwick
Tuesday 8 November 2022, 17:00
Abstract
Much as reading in general can have an impact on readers’ interpretation of reality, reading translated works
can similarly be a way of understanding the world, which then leads readers to act upon their newly gained
sentiments and ideals. The large number of foreign literary works translated into Chinese at the beginning of
the twentieth century, particularly translated love stories, had profound influence on Chinese readers’
perception of romance, marriage and life. Chinese readers, including common readers, writers and translators,
were obsessed with reading translated love stories which shed light on the way romantic love was conceived
and expressed in the West. They often took what they read in novels like La Dame aux Camélias and Immensee
to be principles of love in real life, and some even followed the life paths of the protagonists. This phenomenon
can be best contained using the term Bovarysm, defined by Jules de Gaultier as ‘the human ability to conceive
of oneself as other than one is’. Like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Chinese readers at the turn of the century often
misread messages conveyed by translated love stories, and were so absorbed by romantic stories that the
boundary between literature and life became blurred. Chinese writers actively engaged with translated love
stories to create their own literary works, some of which were autobiographical, while others parodied the
perceived romantic love found in translated love stories.
Speaker Bio
Jane Qian Liu is Associate Professor in Translation and Chinese Studies. She completed her DPhil degree in
Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, and taught for four years at Beijing Normal University. She also
taught modern and contemporary Chinese literature at the University of British Columbia before joining the
University of Warwick. She has published in English and in Chinese on modern Chinese literature, translation
studies and comparative literature, including Transcultural Lyricism: Translation, Intertextuality, and the Rise
of Emotion in Modern Chinese Love Fiction, 1899–1925 (Brill, 2017), and ‘The Making of Transcultural Lyricism
in Su Manshu’s Fiction Writing’ (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 2016). Her current research examines
literary reflections of particular affective expressions in early Republican China. She is associate editor
of Comparative Literature & World Literature, an academic journal published biannually.
Green Ink: Plant-human Relations in Contemporary Sinophone Fiction
Dr Astrid Møller-Olsen, Universities of Lund, Stavanger and Oxford
Friday 11 November 2022, 17:00
Abstract
In this talk, Astrid Møller-Olsen shares her ongoing research on how contemporary Sinophone
works of fiction use botanical characters, plant imagery and green environments to create
alternative realities, explore possible futures and deal with traumatic pasts. Through an
interdisciplinary theoretical framework based on critical plant studies, environmental humanities
and gender studies, Dr Møller-Olsen shows how plants figure as partly human monsters, planetary
partners, or ecological avengers in works by Chi Hui 迟卉, Yan Ge 颜歌, Dorothy Tse’s 謝曉虹, Alai
阿来, Chu T’ien-hsin 朱天心, and Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章.
Speaker Bio
Dr Astrid Møller-Olsen is an international research fellow with the Universities of
Lund, Stavanger and Oxford, funded by the Swedish Research Council. She hosts
the xiaoshuo.blog and has published extensively on contemporary Sinophone
fiction including her recent monograph Sensing the Sinophone: Urban
Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction (Cambria, 2022).
She’s an Icon, She’s Your Type: Linguistic Gender through Typographic and Visual Perspectives in Republican China
Dr Coraline Jortay, University of Oxford
Wednesday 23 November 2022, 17:00
Abstract
In this talk, Coraline Jortay revisits her ongoing research on Republican-era debates surrounding
gender and language through the prism of typography and visual culture. Moving beyond linguistic
pamphlets and grammar books, this talk examines the iconic value that was attributed to newly-
coined gendered pronouns in advertisements, satirical cartoons, or alphabetisation teaching
materials of the 1920s and 1930s. In teasing out the visual valence of their presence or absence in
relation to their conditions of production, as well as to the impediment to the printing press that they
were often said to constitute, this talk also seeks to unravel the manifold entanglements between
gender representations and typographical materiality in the Republican era.
Speaker Bio
Dr Coraline Jortay is the Laming Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford.
Her research investigates the debates surrounding gender equality that rocked the Chinese
intellectual and literary scenes after gendered pronouns were introduced into modern vernacular
Chinese through literary translation in the late 1910s, mapping their afterlives in pronominal re-
appropriations in twentieth and twenty-first century Sinophone literature. A co-founder of the China
Academic Network on Gender (CHANGE), she is also a published translator of contemporary
Sinophone literature into French, with a taste for poetry and short fiction.
Poverty and Squalor in Modern Chinese Realism
Dr Keru Cai, University of Oxford
Tuesday 8 March 2022, 17:00 GMT
Abstract
In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals looked beyond Chinese borders to the foreign other,
Western cultures that offered alternatives to indigenous tradition; and within Chinese borders they became
concerned about the social other, substrata of Chinese society that had hitherto largely escaped literary notice.
Contact with the foreign literary other – particularly Russian realism – facilitated Chinese literary
representation of the social other – the poor. This talk demonstrates that Chinese realist writers frequently
turned to the topic of material poverty – the lack of adequate resources such as food, clothing and shelter –
to convey their sense of textual poverty and national backwardness. Deploring the moral poverty of their
culture, their answer was to depict, with radical seriousness and concern, the bodily suffering of the poor –
homeless vagrants, servants and bondmaids, prostitutes, rickshaw pullers, street food hawkers, silkworm
farmers and starving artists. The combination of a radically new subject matter and experimentation with
foreign literary resources generated major innovations in narrative technique.
In particular, Dr Cai focuses on how writers drew upon Russian intertexts to represent the nation in
narrative form. Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun wished to produce literature that would awaken the
Chinese masses to their national plight, cultural backwardness, and literary deficiencies. How, then, were they
to describe a problem prevalent on a massive scale, endemic to an entire population, in a narrative that follows
merely a handful of individual characters? I show how appropriations from Russian realist texts equipped Lu
Xun with strategies to encapsulate the general in the specific, the national in the individual, by portraying
poverty and squalor. Enabling these kinds of narratives were the rhetorical affordances of metonymy and
synecdoche. These strategies arose from Lu Xun’s study of Gogol, and set a precedent for Chinese realist
writers following him.
Speaker Bio
Dr Keru Cai is a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford; and this fall begins as Assistant
Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Penn State University.
Dr Cai’s book project, From Russia, with Squalor: Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism, demonstrates that
modern Chinese writers drew upon Russian literature to write about poverty, in a bid to enrich Chinese culture
by creating a syncretic new realism. At the same time, Dr Cai shows that writers remained keenly aware of the
problematic nature of deploying this weighty topic for aesthetic purposes. Dr Cai has published widely on
Chinese and comparative literature, including articles in MCLC, Prism, Comparative Literature, Concentric,
and CLEAR.
Vessels and Cargos: Spaces of Inclusion and Exclusion in Johnnie To’s Drug War and Lee Hae-young’s Korean Remake Believer
Dr Jinhee Choi, King’s College London
Tuesday 23 May 2023, 17:00, 17:00 GMT
Abstract
As several scholars have pointed out, Johnnie To’s The Mission (Qianghuo, 1999) was a turning point in the
Hong Kong filmmaker’s directorial career, one in which he began to prioritise group ethics – of triads, of
gangsters, of police squads – over acts of individual heroism. David Bordwell observes that another shift is
discernible in the 2012 release of To’s Drug War (Du zhan) – his production company Milkyway Image’s first
film shot entirely in Mainland China – in terms of its aesthetics and the denial of its protagonists’ moral values.
In this nihilistic film, Timmy Choi (Louis Koo), a member of a drug cartel from Hong Kong, would risk anything,
including trust and brotherhood, to save his own life. The group ethics endorsed by To in such films as The
Mission and PTU: Police Tactical Unit (Jidong budui, 2003) are not to be found in Drug War, only the political
and legal system that punishes characters whose actions deviate from it. As Sun Yi points out, survival is not
only the primary concern for Timmy, but also an apt metaphor for the Hong Kong film industry as a whole
(2018: 228).
The shifting moral, political purview manifest in Drug War provides a useful starting point for a comparison
with its Korean-language remake, director Lee Hae-young’s Believer (Dokjeon, 2018), which initially appears
to be anchored in the individual rivalry between Won-ho (Cho Jin-woong), a detective, and Mr Lee (Ryu Jun-
yeol), the secret mastermind behind a sprawling cocaine production network in South Korea. In this
presentation, Jinhee Choi focuses on how the remake’s restructuring of the earlier film’s plot restricts
characters’ mobility. Despite the two films’ diverging moral compasses and the spaces that are used, there
remains an underlying similarity that allows us to uncover their respective sociopolitical systems, which
deprive individuals of agency. As an adaptation, Believer self-consciously alludes to its source material while
carefully weaving through the intricate layers of cultural exchanges and creativity in the East Asian region.
In this light, it is significant that To is the director of the original film. As an enthusiast of adaptations and a
frequent ‘remaker’ of previous works himself, the Hong Kong filmmaker embodies the kind of cross-cultural
flows that have become increasingly apparent as a distinguishing regional feature, and he makes for a good
illustration of how the past informs present-day filmmaking practices. For instance, he has repeatedly cited
Kurosawa Akira as his major aesthetic influence, dedicating his 2004 judo film Throw Down (Yau doh lung fu
bong) to the legendary Japanese director (Teo 2007: 118). A close analysis of the two films, Drug War and
Believer, will highlight how the unending cycle of intertextual allusions and border-crossing conversations that
links To to Kurosawa and the latter to his own forerunners continues to shape the output of filmmakers in the
region, including Korean director Lee Hae-young.
Speaker Bio
Dr Jinhee Choi is Reader of Film Studies at King’s College of London and the author of The
South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers and Global Provocateurs (Wesleyan
University Press, 2010) and the editor of Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence
(Oxford University Press, 2018). She is currently completing her ‘girl’ book, tentatively
titled Forever Girls: Necrocinematics and Contemporary Korean Girlhood (contracted
with Oxford University Press). Her research areas include contemporary Korean films,
urban space and cinema and philosophy of film, and her articles and book chapters have appeared in
numerous journals and edited volumes, including ‘On a Lonely Planet, Feeling-in-Depth: Wong Kar-wai’s 2046
and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil’ appearing in Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures
(University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and ‘Home is Where the Kitchen Is: Rinco’s Restaurant (2009) and Little
Forest (2014, 2018)’ in Asian Cinema (2020).
