Monday, April 17, 2023 | 12:15pm to 1:40pm
For this talk, Dr. Yunte Huang will speak on his new book, Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics, which explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. “Chinese whispers” refers to an American children’s game dating to the years of the Cold War, a period in which everything Chinese, or even Chinese sounding, was suspect. Taking up various manifestations of the phrase in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Huang investigates how poetry, always to a significant degree untranslatable, complicates the transpacific production of meanings and values.
The book opens with the efforts of I. A. Richards, arguably the founder of Anglo-American academic literary criticism, to promote Basic English in China in the early twentieth century. It culminates by resituating Ernest Fenollosa’s famous essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” exploring the ways in which Chinese has historically enriched but also entrapped the Western conception of language.
This lecture is part of the Global Asian Studies program initiative at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice, with the support from the CUNY Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI), and co-sponsored by the CUNY Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI)
Purchase Book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo182594144.html
