Eileen Chang as World literature
Description
Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920-1995) was a major twentieth-century Chinese author who wrote canonical texts as well as a range of minor narratives in both Chinese and English. Chang’s ambition, from the inception of her long writing career, was to become a successful global writer. She found early literary success in wartime Shanghai, but her Shanghai era was only the first phase in a long journey that crossed continents, islands, and seas.
In recent decades, through translation and cinematic and stage adaptation, Chang’s writings have resonated with an increasingly global audience. Despite her growing acclaim, Chang remains a complex and often controversial figure, famously advocating for an “include me out” perspective. She is often still labeled as a “Shanghai writer,” while her literary journey through four decades of living in the United States has not garnered adequate recognition, nor has she been celebrated as a major English-language author. As Chinese scholarship on Chang has expanded in recent decades, scholarly examinations in English remain few and far between. With this proposal, we offer the case of Eileen Chang as a unique lens through which to collectively explore the encounters, contradictions, and mediations between conflicting cultures and academic traditions.
As a pivotal figure in world literature, Eileen Chang embodies the confluence of transpacific, transmedia, and transcultural encounters. We seek papers that examine her engagement with world literature through her readings, translations, fiction, prose, and screenwriting. We also welcome insights from a close examination of her papers and manuscripts recently made available to researchers. Additionally, we seek explorations of the adaptations and appropriations of Chang's works across various artistic and media forms. We particularly encourage scholarship that engages with languages beyond Chinese and English, making this a genuine effort at “worlding” Chang’s work.
Join us in this scholarly endeavor to redefine the place of Eileen Chang in the tapestry of twentieth-century global literature.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ursula Friedman is a College Fellow in Translation Studies at Harvard University. As a translator and scholar of contemporary Sinophone literature, Ursula adopts a reparative approach to literary translation, whereby author, translator, and reader jointly engage in collective world-making. Ursula's forthcoming book, Self-Translation as Method: Modern Sinophone Self-Translators and their Transmediated Afterlives, envisions self-translation and transmediation as trauma reconciliation technologies.
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Xiaolu Ma is an associate professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Speaker Bio
Carole Hang-fung HOYAN received her PhD. in Asian Studies from The University of British Columbia. She is currently Professor of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, and Director of the Centre for China Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Eileen Chang Studies, Hong Kong Literature, Twentieth Century Chinese literature. She is the author of Re-investigating Eileen Chang: Adaptation, Translation and Research, among others.
Speaker Bio
After graduating from Peking University with an MA in Comparative Literature and World Literature, Limeng Xiong now is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh, and her doctoral research topic is “Write Herself in a Foreign Language: English Autobiographies Written by Chinese Women from the 1920s to the 1960s.”
Papers
Speaker Bio
Liu Yifei holds a PhD in Translation from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and completed her MA at Sun Yat-sen University. Her research interests include translation history, translation theory, and literary translation.
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Karen S. Kingsbury is Professor of Humanities and Asian Studies at Chatham University. She has published three volumes of translations of Eileen Chang, the most recent, Time Tunnel, in partnership with Jie Zhang. She and Silvano Zheng are currently working on a biography of Eileen Chang.
Speaker Bio
Myron Chun-Chieh Tsao is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also serves as an Assistant Instructor of Rhetoric and Writing. His research interests include Asian American literature and literary modernism. His recent article, “Toward a World of Pluriversality: Chang Kuei-hsing and His Rainforest Writings,” appears in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, where he rethinks the world literary space from the perspective of the Global South.
Speaker Bio
Nicole Huang is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She authored Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s (2005) and Hong Kong Connections: Eileen Chang and Worldmaking (2022), and co-edited Written on Water (a collection of essays by Eileen Chang, 2023).