eJournals Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 35/2

Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik
0171-5410
2941-0762
Narr Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, hosted an international conference on Modernism and the Orient, 4–7 June 2010, to explore the role East and South Asia played in the development of literary and visual modernism in Europe and America. Hangzhou 2010 carried on the exciting exchanges begun at Yale 1996 and continued at Cambridge 2004. Members of the organizing committee included Zhaoming Qian (University of New Orleans), Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia), and Sabine Sielke (University of Bonn)
2010
352 Kettemann

3rd International Conference “Modernism and the Orient”

2010
AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Konferenzbericht 3 rd International Conference “Modernism and the Orient” Mary Bamburg Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, hosted an international conference on Modernism and the Orient, 4-7 June 2010, to explore the role East and South Asia played in the development of literary and visual modernism in Europe and America. Hangzhou 2010 carried on the exciting exchanges begun at Yale 1996 and continued at Cambridge 2004. Members of the organizing committee included Zhaoming Qian (University of New Orleans), Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia), and Sabine Sielke (University of Bonn). The 3 rd International Conference on “Modernism and the Orient” was convened in Hangzhou, China, 4-7 June 2010. Co-sponsored by Zhejiang University, the University of New Orleans, Hangzhou Normal University, and Shanghai International Studies University, Hangzhou 2010 was to carry on the exciting exchanges on the theme begun at Yale University in 1996 and continued at the University of Cambridge in 2004. Over 130 scholars from twelve countries, six from the East and six from the West, participated in the renewed dialogue. Four plenary sessions set the tone of the conference while 23 concurrent sessions ran throughout the weekend. The conference opened on the morning of June 5 with welcome addresses by the presidents of both Zhejiang University and Hangzhou Normal University, followed by the first plenary session “Asian Prelude to Modernism” featuring three speakers: Longxi Zhang of City University of Hong Kong, Sabine Sielke of the University of Bonn, and Daniel Albright of Harvard University. Longxi Zhang’s presentation sought to redress an aspect of Oscar Wilde’s work which criticism has so far ignored - his reading of the Taoist leader Zhuangzi in 1890 and the impact of Taoism on his philosophy. Zhang analyzed the particular perspective from which Wilde understood Zhuangzi, allowing the latter to impact his social and political views, his conviction of personal freedom, and his rejection of all forms of government. Wilde recognized in Zhuangzi’s works a philosophy that he later sympathized with in his essay “The Soul Mary Bamburg 230 of Man under Socialism”. Wilde’s interest in Zhuangzi, Zhang concluded, anticipated a similar interest many modernists had well into the twentieth century. Sabine Sielke focused on how Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore - as paradigmatic figures in American modernism and more recent critical debates on how modernist poetics participate in the ongoing (deand re-)constructions of gender - have been recontextualized by current critical perspectives emerging in the larger force field of postcolonial studies. Wondering what we remember of modernism as we ‘orientalize’ its cultural practices, Sielke explored the politics and desire informing revisionary approaches to the poets’ work that waver between yet another attempt at othering modernism and a domestication of the Orient. Daniel Albright began his presentation by recounting a 2009 archaeological discovery, a 33,000-year-old flute which had been found in a cave in southern Germany. Taking off of the Modernist sense that “the most profound art comes from the innermost recesses of the body”, he playfully examined this notion in his reinterpretation of Yeats’s The Herne’s Egg. Featuring a flute made of a heron’s thigh-bone, the play engages an instrument strongly associated with the Orient. Albright also discussed Pound’s opera Le Testament, which has flute music accompany a brothel scene, as well as a selection of Pound’s Chinese poems in which flutes figure prominently. Exploring how in the work of Yeats and Pound the flute interweaves the celestial and unearthly with the outright carnal and sexual, Albright’s presentation showed how at the crossroads of literature and music modernist texts made Orient and Occident collide. The second plenary session “Post-World War II Pound and Moore” featured Ronald Bush of Cambridge University and Zhaoming Qian of the University of New Orleans. Bush centered his presentation on the Buddhist icon Ezra Pound calls Kuanon. Building on previous work on the subject, Bush closely examined the way in which Pound developed the figure in the Italian and English avant-texts of the Pisan Cantos. Pound’s unpublished drafts revealed more of the process of refining the figure of Kuanon and thus allowed us to trace its way into the Cantos. For Bush, Pound’s drafts make Kuanon function as a bridge between Buddhist and Confucian thought. Closely associated with the trope of the willow, Kuanon amplified Pound’s account of “the power of compassionate nature to rescue the poet from the depths of his despair”. Qian’s presentation was based on his recent discovery of a recording of Moore’s 1957 lecture on The Tao of Painting by the Chinese painter and writer Mai-mai Sze. This lecture, entitled “Tedium and Integrity”, proved to be at once a tribute to the Taoist aesthetic (“Integrity”) and a critique of contemporary American poetry (“Tedium”). Qian used Moore’s lecture along with other archival material to show that Moore’s exchanges with Sze, during the years between 1957 and 1968, channeled a new creativity, resulting in the astonishing experimental modernism of her late lyrics. Poems such as, for instance, “To a Giraffe” and “Blue Bug”, which appeared in Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), display Moore’s renewed confidence in the modernist ideal of impersonality during the early postmodern era. The final two plenary sessions were held on the afternoon of June 6. The session on “Proust, Joyce, and Woolf” featured presentations by Christine Froula of Northwestern University, Ira Nadel of the University of British Columbia, and Fen Gao of Zhejiang University. In her presentation, Froula discussed Marcel Proust’s À la 3 rd International Conference “Modernism and the Orient” 231 Recherche du Temps Perdu and its complex allusions to cultures of the Near, Middle, and Far East. In the spirit of André Benhaïm’s argument that Proust’s Orient “owes little to Orientalism: rather it shows a desire to disorient Frenchness” (2005: 87) by registering residues of influences from beyond France’s geographical borders, Froula’s presentation approached Proust’s evocations of Eastern cultures through allusions to the seventeenth-century Dutch master Vermeer. Appropriating for Bergotte’s death scene a French art critic’s 1921 claim that Vermeer’s craft had a Chinese patience otherwise to be found only in paintings from the Far East, Proust opened France’s borders, Froula argued, to a historically-grounded cultural imagination resonating throughout his Recherche. Showing that elements of and allusions to Chinese culture permeate James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, the presentation by Ira Nadel focused on the Oriental touches in Joyce’s graphic design - and in particular on the ways in which Joyce’s typography and visual forms echoed Chinese writing. Joyce’s choices in diction and punctuation, such as the isolated full stop at the end of the “Ithaca” section of Ulysses, shape meaning through visual form in a manner reminiscent of ideogrammic methods. Nadel attributed this practice to the impact of Ernest Fenollosa, whose work Joyce knew by way of Pound’s revision and publication of Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. In her paper, Fen Gao examined Virginia Woolf’s critique of traditional Western conceptions of truth and argued that the author’s insights relate to a complementary concept of creativity called zhenhuan in traditional Chinese poetics. Tracing the development of Woolf’s writing through works including “Monday or Tuesday”, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One’s Own, Gao found in each a different facet of this proximity. In the fourth and final plenary session, “China in Modernism/ Modernism in China”, Qiping Yin of Hangzhou Normal University and Jiande Lu of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences presented their work. Yin began by addressing an imbalance in Robert Frost criticism: many critics argue that the common ground between Frost’s poetics and Taoism is their “quest for a thorough freedom” from self, society, and nature. Yin countered this somewhat reductive view by discussing two opposed, but balanced impulses within Taoism: Chu Shi (meaning to renounce the world) and Ru Shi (meaning to accept the world). On this ground he examined Frost’s poetry, finding both aspects of Chu Shi and juxtaposed moments of Ru Shi. Lu’s presentation was an injunction to further explore modernism and its relationship to the Orient, to widen the field of inquiry. Starting from a discussion of G.L. Dickinson’s critique of nationalistic sentiments, Lu proposed that we develop a more global perspective of modernisms. To do so, the conferences on “Modernism and the Orient” should begin to take a look at Chinese modernism of the 1920s and what Lu called “home-made orientalism”. 23 concurrent sessions ran throughout the conference, 15 on the afternoon of June 5 and eight on the morning of June 6, interrogating subjects such as “Modernism Out of Japan”, “Visual Modernism”, “Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence”, “East/ West: a Post-Apocalyptic World”, “China and India in Western Works”, “Oriental Readings of Western Modernism”, “China’s Imports from and Exports to Modernism”, “Moore, Stevens, and China”, “Pound’s Chinese Translations”, “Eliot and India”, “Between Oriental Culture and Modernism”, “Pound and Confucian Ethics”, “Reception and Mary Bamburg 232 Recognition”, “Buddhism and Confucianism in American Poetry”, and “Recognizing Eastern Selves in Modernism”. From diverse critical perspectives participants explored the relationships of China, Japan, and India to Western modernism across the fields of literature, fine arts, film, television, music, science, religion, and philosophy. Three extracurricular events supplemented the conference: “Chamber Music and Chamber Conversation”, mediated by Daniel Albright and Lidan Lin, on the evening of June 5 (with Western pieces responding to Li Bai’s poetry by John Austin and Eastern pieces by local musicians); a walking tour of Hefang Street, a renovated Song Dynasty street, on the evening of June 6; and a visit to Linying Temple, a Buddhist temple of the Chan sect, in Hangzhou, on the morning of June 7. During the closing session Jieping Fan, Assistant President of Zhejiang University, praised the conference both for its intellectual scope and as an ongoing dialogue of an international community of scholars. References Benhaïm, André (2005). “From Baalbek to Baghdad and Beyond: Marcel Proust’s Foreign Memories of France.” Journal of European Studies 35/ 1. 87-101. Mary Bamburg University of New Orleans New Orleans, Louisiana, USA