Lectures and papers
“The First Media Theory” and “Viability.” SCT, July 2008.
“Media Creoles and the Invention of the Delüfeng.” Conference on “Translations and Transformations: China, Modernity, and Cultural Transmission,” CRASSH, University of Cambridge, May 2008.
“The Materials of Poetry.” Workshop on “Materiality,” Needham Research Institute, University of Cambridge, April 2008.
“Viability.” Plenary lecture, conference on “Terrestriality, Reinscription, Memory Regimes: A Workshop on Climate Change and the Archive.” University at Albany, April 2008.
“On Not Knowing Chinese.” Workshop on “Culture, Translation, Transmission,” CRASSH, University of Cambridge, March 2008.
“Media Creoles and the Invention of the Delüfeng.” Conference on “Translations and Transformations: China, Modernity, and Cultural Transmission,” CRASSH, University of Cambridge, May 2008.
“The Materials of Poetry.” Workshop on “Materiality,” Needham Research Institute, University of Cambridge, April 2008.
“Viability.” Plenary lecture, conference on “Terrestriality, Reinscription, Memory Regimes: A Workshop on Climate Change and the Archive.” University at Albany, April 2008.
“On Not Knowing Chinese.” Workshop on “Culture, Translation, Transmission,” CRASSH, University of Cambridge, March 2008.
“Comparative Literature Between World Literature and Media Studies.” Provost’s Work-in-Progress Series, King’s College, University of Cambridge, March 2008.
“Retracing the Chinese Written Character, Or, Subtracting Pound's Subtractions.” University of Chicago, Poetry and Poetics Seminar, January 2008.
“Whither Comparative Literature?” University of Chicago, Program in Comparative Literature, January 2008.“One Poem or Three? ‘The Bowmen of Shu’ and its Formal Analysis.” United States Military Academy, West Point, October 2007.
“A Nomination for Comparative Literature’s Patron Saint, If One Is Needed.” Keynote lecture at the fourth annual graduate student conference, “Unbound: The Humanities in Transition,” University of Texas - Austin, October 2007.
“The Zhuangzi: Work as Membrane, Or, The Repeated Possibility of Comparative Literature.” Matheson Lecture, Washington University in St. Louis, October 2007.
“Going Places with Zhuangzi.” CRASSH, University of Cambridge, May 2007.
“Language Learning No Luxury.” The British Academy, London, May 2007.
“Kinship.” American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting, Puebla, Mexico, April 2007.
“Zhuangzi as Work and Membrane.” Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, April 2007.
“The Property Formerly Known as ‘Literariness’.” Program in Comparative Literature, Northwestern University, April 2007.
“Homage to Hacking.” Keynote address, conference “Navigating Interdisciplinarity,” University of Toronto, March 2007.
“Language Teaching as Intellectual Work.” Dean’s Forum, Harvard University, March 2007.
“Le papillon chinois. Le Tchouang-tseu (Zhuangzi), ses transformations, et l’ouverture de la littérature chinoise sur l’ailleurs.” Séminaire de doctorat, UFR de littérature générale et comparée, Université de Paris-III, January-February 2007.
“Enlarging Language Study.” Modern Language Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, December 2006.
“Folklore: The Past and Future of Comparative Literature?” Modern Language Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, December 2006.
“‘Pages of Illustrations’: A Poetics of the Inventory” (keynote address), and “The Inscribing Ear: A Hardly Legible Archive,” conference on “Poetics of the Inventory: Collections, Lists, Series and Archives,” Fundaçao Casa de Rui Barbosa, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 2006.
“Pound/Fenollosa, ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’: Unwitting Collaboration, International Text.” Conference on “Translation in a Non-Literary Age,” University of California – Santa Barbara, May 2006.
“Controversial Classics in 1920s China.” Association of Ancient Historians annual meeting, Stanford, California, May 2006.
“Future Tasks of Comparative Literature: The Risks of Surveying in 1903 and 2005,” “Literary Theory as a Part of General Culture,” “Electronic Pedagogy and Chinese Literature,” “Representing Large Numbers.” University of Aarhus, Denmark, March 2006.
“In the Fear of Mimesis is the Beginning of Theory. But Now?” UCLA Comparative Literature Colloquium, January 2006.
“Getting Mimetic (Again).” Seminar in Cultural History, Bard Graduate Center, New York, January 2006.
“Trans=Culture.” Symposium on “Transcultural Humanities,” Duke University, December 1, 2005.
“‘World Literature’ and Possible Futures of Comparative Literature.” International Comparative Literature Association congress, Venice, Italy, September 2005.
“Death and Translation.” University of Wisconsin – Minneapolis; Middlebury College, April 2005.
“Narratives of the Chinese Silver Crisis.” ACLA Annual Meeting, Pennsylvania State University, March 2005.
“The Modernist Overlay: Arguing About Chinese Theater, 1918-1935.” Yale – Peking University Conference, “Tradition and Modernity, Comparative Perspectives,” March 2005.
“‘China and the World’: The Tale of a Topos.” Lecture series, “Global Languages and Literatures,” University of Washington, February 2005. Also presented at the Comparative Literature Forum, Pennsylvania State University; Open Forum, Yale University; Asia at Noon, University at Buffalo.
“Gardens and Collections: The Installation Art of Kings.” Conference on “Activity and Repose: Place, Memory and Sociality in Chinese and Japanese Gardens,” The Huntington Library, Los Angeles, California, December 2004.
“‘La parole est un mouvement’: la leçon de Pierre-Jean Rousselot retransmise par Marcel Jousse.” Conference on “Marcel Jousse et la pédagogie,” Université Catholique de l’Ouest, November 2004 (in absentia).
“So Natural, It’s Automatic: Humanistic Studies and Culture Machines.” Keynote address, Southern African Folklore Society International Festival-Conference, University of KwaZulu-Natal, September 2004.
“The Career of Rhyme: A Tentative Comparative Ethnographic Investigation.” Institute of Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, August 2004.
“Three Tricky Words: Paradigm, Discourse, Culture.” ICLA Triennial Conference, Hong Kong, August 2004.
“Mei Lanfang in Moscow, 1935: Familiar, Unfamiliar, Defamiliar.” Conference on “Orientalism and Modernism,” King’s College, Cambridge University, June 2004.
“Another Yelp for Liberty.” boundary 2 / Nanjing University International Conference, May 2004 (in absentia).
“‘Two or Three Hundred Rhythmic Phrases’: The ‘Formula’ from Paulhan to Granet to Jousse to Parry.” Conference on “Religion, Poetry and Memory in Early China,” Princeton University, May 2004.
“For Comparison’s Sake: East Asian Literatures as Exception and as Rule.” Society for Intercultural Comparative Studies, Princeton University, March 2004.
“Economies of Scarcity and Economies of Excess: A Department Head’s Perspective on the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing.” Modern Language Association Annual Meeting, San Diego, December 2003.
“Jokes, Metaphors, Lies, Allusions and the Rest of Literature: Advanced Competency as Rhetoric or (horribile dictu!) as Latin.” Association of Departments of Foreign Languages Annual Seminar, New Haven, June 2003.
“I’m reading Honglou meng. Don’t tell Zhiyan zhai!” Conference on “Tradition and Modernity in Chinese Women’s History,” Rice University, March 2003.
“Creolization in East Asian Literatures: Different Differences.” Modern Language Association Annual Meeting, New York, December 2002.
“De la psychologie mécaniste au Style oral en passant par la phonétique expérimentale, le parcours original de Marcel Jousse.” Rencontre internationale Marcel Jousse, Paris, November 2002.
“An Aesthetics of Interaction.” Comparative Literature Association of China annual conference, Nanjing, August 2002.
“What is an ‘Ideogram’?,” “Reading the Odes,” and “Translations Without Originals: ‘Chinese’ Poetry in Languages Other Than Chinese,” three lectures given in Mandarin at the Chinese Civilisation Centre, City University of Hong Kong, July 2002.
“‘Thunder, Rainbows and Spicy Herbs’: The Lore of Qi and the Tokens of Chineseness.” Conference on “The Disunity of Chinese Science,” University of Chicago, May 2002.
“Authenticity and Betrayal: Dramas of Translation, Genre and Style.” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, Puerto Rico, April 2002.
“Why Musical Hermeneutics Matters.” Rice University, February 2002; Harvard University East Asia Center, April 2002.
“The Canon, the Uncanon, and the Other Canons: Or, Why You Can’t Stop With Just One Decentering.” Tulane University, February 2002.
“Baudelaire in 1920s China: or, Reading as Putrefaction.” MLA Annual Meeting, New Orleans, December 2001.
“Matteo Ricci the Daoist.” Conference on “Matteo Ricci and After: Four Centuries of Cultural Interaction,” Hong Kong and Beijing, October 2001.
“‘Ritual Separates, Music Unites’: Why Musical Hermeneutics Matters.” Conference on “Understanding Chinese Poetics: Recarving the Dragons,” Prague, September 2001.
“How the Honglou meng Became a Classic.” University of Aarhus, Denmark, May 2001.
“Attribution (of a book, of a meaning).” Conference on “Reading Eighteenth-Century China Through Dream of the Red Chamber,” University of Pennsylvania, April 2001.
“Magnetic Language.” Conference on “Baroque Imaginary: The World of Athanasius Kircher, S.J. (1602-1680),” Stanford University, April 2001.
“Kircher, Wilkins, Leibniz: Seventeenth-Century Language Artifices and What They Say.” Conference on “The Contest of Languages,” University of Notre Dame, April 2001.
“Translation and Countertranslation: Lessons from the Wolfman.” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Boulder, Colorado, April 2001.
“Voices of Women in Classical Chinese Poetry.” Seminar on “Literature and Literary History in Global Contexts,” project funded by the Swedish Research Council, Stockholm, Sweden, March 2001.
“Almost Anonymous—How the Honglou meng Finally Found an Author.” Ostasiatiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, March 2001.
“Some Standard Problems in the Comparative Study of Chinese Literature.” Seminar on “Literature and Literary History in Global Contexts,” project funded by the Swedish Research Council, Stockholm, Sweden, March 2001.
“The Ethnography of Rhythm.” Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University, January 2001.
“Teaching Cross-Cultural Studies to Cross-Cultural People.” Pacific Neighborhood Conference, Hong Kong, January 2001.
“Mei Lanfang’s Performances in Moscow, 1935: Contemporary Reactions and Consequences.” Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, December 2000.
“Noah’s Ark as the Tower of Babel: Making Sense of the Universal Writing Schemes of the Seventeenth Century.” Department of English, Hong Kong University, December 2000.
“Burning the Library in Order to Save It: Kang Youwei’s Textual Studies After 100 Years.” Conference on “Chinese Hermeneutics in the Modern Age,” National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, November 2000.
“The Shadow of Mei Lanfang in Barthes’ Empire of Signs.” Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong, November 2000.
“Rhyme, Memory, and the Early Written Language of China.” Center for Chinese Civilization, City University of Hong Kong, October 2000.
“How to Translate from a Non-Existent Original.” Workshop on “Appropriation: Between Languages, Among Nations,” Stanford University, May 2000.
“Canons Without Authors: The Honglou meng before Cao Xueqin.” Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, San Diego, California, March 2000.
“Calculating and Perceiving: Towards the Ends (Kant and Leibniz).” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, New Haven, Connecticut, February 2000.
“Introducing Bei Dao.” For the Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University, November 1999.
“Honor to the Prophets: The Canonization of the Authorless Honglou meng.” Presented at “Canon and Commentary: An International Conference on Chinese Hermeneutics,” City University of Hong Kong, October 1999. Revised version presented at Berkeley China Colloquium, January 2000.
“Calculated Surprises: Where Deconstruction and China Coincide.” Workshop on Literature / Theory / China / Japan, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, June 1999.
“A Blank in the History: The ‘Post-New Period’ and its Periodizers.” Conference on “China Ten Years After Tiananmen,” Joint East Asian Studies Center, University of Toronto, June 1999.
“Print and Permeability: The Micro-Politics of Scientific Communication Between China and Europe circa 1600.” Conference on “Rethinking Science and Civilization,” Stanford University, May 1999.
“Calculated Surprises: Rhetoric and Audience in Deconstructive China Work.” University of Chicago Comparative Literature Colloquium, April 1999.
“No Time Like the Present: Contemporaneity as a Category in Chinese Studies.” Reed College, November 1998.
“Trouver le terme qui correspond: imprimerie et équivalence dans la première globalisation.” Conference on “Religion and Media,” Château de la Bretesche, France, September 1998.
“The Point of Pure Chronology: Giuseppe Ferrari and Chinese History.” Conference on “Thinking Through Comparisons,” Oregon Humanities Center, University of Oregon, May 1998.
“Three Questions About the Couplet: Whence? How? When?” AAS Annual Meeting, Washington DC, March 1998.
“Scenes from the History of Double Translation.” ACLA Annual Meeting, Austin, Texas, March 1998.
“Inalienables and Non-Negotiables in the Field of Exchange.” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Puerto Vallarta, April 1997.
“The Unreliable Anthologists: Liu Xiang and Liu Xin in Historical Perspective.” Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Chicago, March 1997.
“The Poetics of Kang Youwei’s Universal History.” Modern Language Association Annual Meeting, Washington, December 1996.
“In the Workshop of Equivalences: Seventeenth-Century Globalism and the Comparative Pursuit.” Comparative Literature Lecture Series, University of Oregon, November 1996.
“Sima Qian’s Classics: What They Were, What’s At Stake.” ACLS Workshop on Approaches to the Shi ji, Harvard University, October 1996.
“Authenticity and Legitimacy, or, What Remains of the Old Text / New Text Controversy Today?” Early China Seminar, Center for Chinese Studies, University of California at Berkeley, September 1996.
“Initials, Finals, Rhymes and Roots: The Scandal of Similarity in the Chinese Writing System.” Stanford Humanities Center, Colloquium on “Script and Diglossia,” May 1996.
“Rhyme, Repetition and Exchange in the Book of Songs.” Harvard University East Asia Colloquium, April 1996.
“Ethnographies of Rhythm.” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, South Bend, Indiana, April 1996.
“Ideography: Problems of Representation.” Modern Language Association Annual Conference, New York, December 1995.
“Essentialism in Practice.” Response to panel “Essentialism in Chinese History and Cultural Politics,” Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, April 1995.
“The Ethnography of Rhythm: Paulhan, Granet, Jousse, Benveniste.” Colloquium in Critical Theory, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Riverside, February 1995.
“Xue Baoqin and Her Readers: An Episode in the Hong lou meng.” University of Chicago, East Asia Forum, April 1994.
“Karl Rosenkranz’s Aesthetik des Häßlichen and Die Poesie und ihre Geschichte: Two Ways of Being Neo-Hegelian.” Kentucky Foreign Languages Conference, April 1994.
“Syntax and Semantics in the Definition of Wen.” Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Boston, April 1994.
“Imitation and Inscription in the Li ji: The Place of Verbal Art.” Stanford University, February 1994.
“Women’s Writing Before and Within the Hong lou meng.” Conference on “Women and Literature in Ming-Qing China,” Yale University, June 1993.
“Notional Genres and Pseudo-Authors.” Comparative Literature Works-in-Progress Series, UCLA, May 1993.
“Aristotle and Varro on Discourse and Figure.” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, December 1991.
“Reading Reversible and Irreversible.” West Coast Chinese Poetry Group, University of California at Santa Barbara, May 1991.
“The Asiatic Mode of Text Production: Hegel, Marx and Some Accomplices.” East Asia History Forum, Yale University, March 1990.
“The Logic of Example: Hsün-tzu as Shadow Author of the Great Preface to the Book of Odes.” East Coast Chinese Poetry Group, SUNY-Albany, November 1989.
“Naïve and/or Sentimental Criticism: the Case of East-West Comp Lit.” North American Graduate Student Conference: “Politics of Comparison,” University of Massachusetts at Amherst, April 1988.
“New Work on the Hung-lou-meng.” Yale College, February 1987.
Lectures and papers
Friday, January 5, 2007
