2023-24 Visual Culture Seminar

One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929‒1939

Paul Bevan (University of Oxford) and Susan Daruvala (University of Cambridge)

Tuesday 17 October 2023, 17:00

Synopsis

Shao Xunmei, poet, essayist, publisher and printer, played a significant role in the publication and dissemination of
journals and pictorial magazines in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. Shao’s poetry has been translated by several
prominent scholars through the years, but remarkably few of his essays have received the same attention, and this is the
first collection of his prose writings to have been published in English. Shao has been described by a phalanx of scholars
as the most seriously underestimated modern cultural Chinese figure. This collection of his writings joins several recent
publications that aim to raise Shao’s literary and historical profile. It will appeal to a broad swathe of readers interested
in the transnational and transcultural dimensions of twentieth-century experience that have become so important for
contemporary scholarship.

The essays in this book, some of which were selected by the writer’s daughter, Shao Xiaohong, include long essays such
as ‘One Man Talking’ and ‘A Year in Shanghai’, as well as several shorter essays on subjects as diverse as the caricatures
of Miguel Covarrubias, woodblock printing and pictorial magazines, all of which were published in Shao’s own magazines.
Although his essays may be less well known than those of other writers of the same period, without his unique and
valuable contribution, the literary, artistic and poetic worlds of twentieth-century Shanghai would have been very
different indeed.

Speaker Bio

Paul Bevan is a freelance Sinologist, researcher, translator and lecturer. From 2020‒2023 he was Departmental Lecturer
in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford and Retained Lecturer in Chinese at Wadham
College. From 2018 to 2020 he worked as Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He
is now an Associate Member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. His latest
book, a translation of The Adventures of Ma Suzhen: An Heroic Woman Takes Revenge in Shanghai, was recently
published by Palgrave Macmillan. He has written two monographs: ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’: Modern Art and Literature in
Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age (Brill, 2020), and A Modern Miscellany – Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao
Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926‒1938 (Brill, 2015).

Susan Daruvala works in modern Chinese literature and film. She is a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge
although now retired from her teaching post in the Department of East Asian Studies. She is the author of Zhou Zuoren
and an Alternative Chinese response to Modernity. Her current research interests focus on Chinese aesthetic discourses,
as well as the modern Chinese essay, the literary scene in Republican China and Chinese film.

Gao Xingjian’s Bilingual Experimentation on the World Stage: Encounters with Translation

Kate Costello (University of Oxford)

Tuesday 28 November 2023, 17:00

Synopsis

Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian is one of the most renowned and controversial writers working in the Chinese
language today. How has bilingualism shaped the contours of Gao’s experimentation? While there is a growing
body of research dedicated to Gao’s role as a cultural intermediary, there is virtually no scholarship on his
translation practice. This talk explores how the activities that undergird translation manifest themselves in his
literary theory, considering how these techniques were transferred to his novels, with varying degrees of
success. Gao’s experimental practice is intimately bound with translation: perhaps fittingly, it is through
translation that his work has received critical acclaim. How does the translation process complicate or
corroborate Gao’s aesthetic vision? Interrogating the transformations that 靈山 (Soul Mountain) undergoes
in translation, this talk will examine how Mabel Lee’s translation upholds Gao’s aesthetic theory more potently
than his own Chinese, before considering what else the novel could look like in English. Kate Costello concludes
her investigation by exploring the effervescent wordplay in his French language plays as the culmination of
decades of metalinguistic experimentation, carrying out the techniques from his early fiction in a new language
and medium.

Speaker Bio

Kate Costello is a Chinese-English translator and doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, specializing in
modern Chinese literature and culture. Her doctoral thesis examines bilingualism, language games and word
play in modern and contemporary experimental literature. Her research focuses on the relationship between
bilingualism and linguistic experimentation, investigating the ways that multiple language competencies are
deployed within a literary text. Paying special attention to the creative manipulation of sound, script and
syntax, her dissertation examines the playful, devious and irreverent ways that bilingual competencies
manifest themselves in experimental writing. She has served as co-convener of the Oxford Comparative
Criticism and Translation Discussion Group and has presented at international conferences including the
American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting, the Modern Language Association annual
convention, the Association for Asian Studies annual conference and the Association for Chinese Literature
and Comparative Literature biannual conference.