Madame White, The Book of Change, and Eileen Chang: On A Poetics of Involution

Rutgers University will host Professor David Der-wei Wang who will talk about author Eileen Chang's aesthetics of revision and bilingualism.

David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese
Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and
Civilizations at Harvard University and Director of CCK Foundation
Inter-University Center for Sinological Studies. His specialties are
Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature, Late Qing fiction and
drama, and Comparative Literary Theory. Wang received his Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and
he has taught at National Taiwan University and Columbia University.

In the studies of Eileen Chang (张爱玲, 1920-1995) one aspect yet to be
explored is her penchant for rewriting existing works in multiple
iterations and languages. This lecture addresses Chang's aesthetics
of revision and bilingualism by examining her two English novels, The
Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Change, which were discovered in
2009 and will be published in 2010. These two novels provide a
missing link in Chang's (re)writing of her own life story, from
English to Chinese and vice versa, from essay to fiction and photo
album, and from autobiographical "whispers" to dramatized exposé.
Writers and critics of the revolutionary discourse would not welcome
Chang's vision. But insofar as her writing entertains a negative
dialectic of history and progress, Chang has provided a sobering view
from which to detect Chinese literary modernity at its most convoluted.