Jabberwocky in Print: Xu Bing and the Image of Writing

The Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University presents a discussion with Professor Lydia Liu on the image of writing.

Lydia H. Liu
W. T. Tam Professor in the Humanities, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

The image of writing—or a certain image of writing—often governs the ways in which people look at themselves and at other cultures. The familiar distinctions we make among pictography, ideography, alphabetical writing, and so on have implied sweeping generalizations about the mind, human evolution, technology, and civilization. Chinese artist Xu Bing has effectively challenged these distinctions and raised new theoretical questions about the boundaries of language and its materiality. Lydia Liu will address these questions and relate them to her current work on digital writing.

Professor Liu is currently the W. T. Tam Professor in the Humanities, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director of Graduate Studies, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University; and Director, the Center for Translingual and Transcultural Studies at Tsinghua University, Beijing