Center for East Asian Studies
China Brown Bag
Ban Wang, Professor of Comparative and Chinese Literature, Rutgers University
This talk shows the way the Chinese village, a place of nostalgia and memory, is portrayed against the backdrop of modernization, revolution, market expansion, and urbanization. Whether as a romantic retreat or a repository of traditional values and custom, the village, its landscape and rituals, is fraught with problems of modernity in a troubled relation to tradition. Film clips will be shown.
Ban Wang is a visiting professor at Stanford this year, teaching on modern Chinese literature. His major publications include The Sublime Figure of History (Stanford University Press, 1997), Illuminations from the Past (Stanford, 2004), and Lishi yu jiyi (history and memory) (Oxford University Press, 2004). An expanded edition of the history and memory book was published by Nanjing University Press this year. He has been a research fellow with the National Endowment for the Humanities and has also taught at State University of New York-Stony Brook and Harvard University.