| DATE: | Saturday, July 14, 2001 |
|---|---|
| TIME: | 2:00 p.m. |
| PLACE: | IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Floor |
| FORMAT: | Special summer event |
| SPONSOR: | Institute of East Asian Studies |
Frederic Wakeman, Haas Professor of Asian Studies and Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
Haun Saussy, Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Dominic Cheung, Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Southern California
Dominic Cheung 張錯
Jiao Tong 焦桐
Hsi Muren 席慕蓉
Hsu Hui-chih 許悔之
Chen I-chih 陳義芝
Followed by a book signing and reception
This program will be held in Chinese and English
Free and open to the public
Participants Biographies
Dominic Cheung, alias Chang Ts'o 張錯 is a poet scholar teaching at the University of Southern California. As Professor of Comparative Literature, he is also professor and chairperson of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at USC. Born in 1943 in Macau, raised in China and Hong Kong, educated in Taiwan and the United States, he has published twelve volumes of poetry in Chinese, in addition to more than twenty books of prose, literary criticism and translation. His most recent poetic works include Selected Poems (1999), A Map of Drifting (2001) and Drifting (in English, Green Integer Books, Los Angeles/Kobenhaven, 2000).
Hsi Muren 席慕蓉, a native Mongolian poet-painter believed to be the direct descent of Genghis Khan, was born in 1943 in China, but grew up in Taiwan. After completing her studies at the National Taiwan Normal University, she studied oil painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, graduating with the award Premier Prix avec la Plus Grande Distinction. She has since then held more than ten solo exhibitions, and has taught for several years at the Provincial Hsinchu Junior Normal College. While her oil paintings have earned her several awards both in Europe and Taiwan, she is widely known as a poet and essayist. Her first two poetry collections, Seven Miles of Fragrance (1981) and Youth of No Regret (1983) are so popular that they have been reprinted many times in Taiwan and mainland China, setting a new record of editions on contemporary Chinese poetry collections. Since then she has published more than twenty collections of poetry and prose. Her writings have focused mainly on Mongolian culture and the ecological crisis in Mongolia. Across the Darkness of the River, a selection of her poems in English translation was published by Green Integer Books, Los Angeles/Kobenhaven, 2001.
Chen I-chih 陳義芝. Born in Hualien eastern Taiwan, 1953, Chen I-chih began writing poems in the early 1970s. Since then he has published six collections of poem: A Setting Sun against Rising Smoke (1977), Black Gown (1985), The Newlywed Departure (1989), The Unforgettable Faraway Place (1993), The Anxious Dwelling (1998), and The Mysterious Hualien (poems in English translation, Green Integer, Los Angeles/Kovenhaven, 2001). With his academic background in Chinese literature, Chen's poems are imbued with a rich blend of classical and modern imagery, leading to an intense lyrical poignancy that is unprecedented in Taiwanese poetry today. He received his B.A. in Chinese from National Taiwan Normal University, M.A. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is working towards his Ph.D. in Kaohsiung Normal University. He is currently editor in chief of the literary supplement of the United Daily News, a leading influential newspaper in Taiwan.
Jiao Tong 焦桐, a penname for Yeh Chen-fu, was born in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan in 1956. He received his B.A. and M.A. in drama from the Chinese Culture University. A well-known poet and essayist, Jiao Tong is now the Executive Deputy Director of the literary supplement of Taiwan's China Times, a daily newspaper with over a million circulation. He is also a lecturer of modern Chinese literature at the National Central University. Since 1983, Jiao has published or edited eight poetry collections and twelve essay collections. His recent poetic work, A Complete Cookbook for Male Potency Enhancement (2000), also appearing in English translation as Erotic Recipes: A Complete Menu for Male Potency Enhancement (Green Integer Books, 2001, Los Angeles/Kobenhaven, 2001), is a political satire to ridicule the myth of the Nationalist government's fantasy to recover China mainland. It also attempts to unmask the modern male's utmost fear of impotence, particularly Taiwanese men who have great obsessions in aphrodisiacs and male potency.
Hsu Hui-chih 許悔之 was born in 1966 in Taoyuan, Taiwan. His career as a young poet began in 1981 when he won a poetry contest for high-school students in Taoyuan County. Later, as a student at National Taipei Institute of Technology, he co-organized an influential poetry society named "The Horizon." So far he has published six collections of poetry: Sunlight Beehive (1990), A Formosan Clan (1991), The Corporeal Body (1993), No Tears for Me, My Buddha (1994), When a Whale is Longing for the Ocean (1997), A Deer in Grief (2000) and Book of Reincarnation (forthcoming, Green Integer Books, Los Angeles/Kobenhaven). In addition to writing poetry on native Taiwanese soil, Hsu is also known for his Buddhist poems in which the poet shows in intense, and often paradoxical, images the struggle between the flesh and the soul, between humanity and divinity, between desires and attachment on the one hand and emptiness and transcendence on the other. He has won numerous awards and prizes for poetry, and his works appear in important anthologies both in Taiwan and in mainland China. He is now chief editor of Unitas: A Literary Monthly in Taipei.
Haun Saussy is Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He recently completed a term as chair of the Asian Languages Department there. Prof. Saussy previously taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1990. He has also studied in Paris and Taiwan. Professor Saussy's research includes literary theory, early Chinese poetry, comparative literature, and didactic and hermeneutic genres. His written works include The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) for which he received the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association; An Anthology of Chinese Women Poets from Ancient Times to 1911, Editor, with Kang-i Sun Chang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); "Rhyme, Repetition and Exchange in the Book of Songs" in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, December 1997. Works in progress are Authored Authors: Cao Xueqin's "Dream of the Red Chamber" and the Creation of a Women's Literature and Letters from Homer: Notes on Writing and Orality. His forthcoming book, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China, is due out from Harvard University Press in the fall.
Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr. is the Haas Professor of Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is just finishing an eleven-year term as director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Berkeley. Professor Wakeman studied European history and literature at Harvard, political science at the Institut d'études politiques in Paris, and East Asian history and languages at Berkeley, where he got his Ph.D. in 1965. Professor Wakeman's most recent books include Policing Shanghai 1927-1937 (University of California Press, 1995) and The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937-1941 (Cambridge University Press, 1996). One of his past works, The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth Century China, won the Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. His most recent work on Dai Li, the head of Chiang Kai-shek's secret police, has been accepted for publication by the University of California Press. Professor Wakeman served as president of the Social Science Research Council from 1986 to 1989 and as President of the American Historical Association in 1992.
