CCS Noon Lecture Series: Stereotypes, Biases, Paradigms, and Uncertainties: On Understanding China

Zhang Longxi will examine some of the received notions about China and Chinese culture in the West and the perplexities and uncertainties of a fast-changing China.

Zhang Longxi Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong and Cheung Kong Chair Professor at the Beijing Foreign Studies University

Professor Zhang will argue that we need to break away from such notions and try to look at China from different perspectives, combining views from the outside and inside, native and Western scholarships. Zhang Longxi received his MA in English from Peking University and his Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. He has taught at Peking, Harvard and the University of California, Riverside. He has published in both Chinese and English, and his major publications include The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Duke, 1992), Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, 1998), Out of Cultural Ghetto (Commercial Press Hong Kong, in Chinese, 2000), Ten Essays in Chinese-Western Cross-Cultural Studies (Fudan, 2005), Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Cornell, 2005), and Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (Toronto, 2007).