MCLC Resource Center

Source: China Heritage (nd)
幽默: You Having a Laugh? The Birth of Humour in Modern China

Christopher Rea’s The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (University of California Press, 2015) was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize (Post-1900 China) at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in March 2017. The prize is given in recognition of books that offer ‘the greatest contribution to increasing understanding of the history, culture, society, politics, or economy of China’ during the preceding year.

The citation for Chris Rea’s award reads, in part:

The Age of Irreverence offers a fresh perspective on the late Qing and early Republican era, focusing on the use of humor. The book balances with levity the better-known accounts of this period as steeped in ponderous intellectual debates. Rea taps into previously ignored sources, honing on parodic verses and essays, fantastic novels, cartoons, amusement halls, and photography, to show how these and other materials produced “cultures of mirth.” As the book demonstrates, the discourse of irreverence, manifested in specific practices, took part in forming and challenging claims to modernity.

Christopher Rea is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and former director of the Centre for Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia. Among other things, he was also in the first group of Post-doctoral Fellows at the Australian Centre on China in the World, founded in 2010, and during his time in the Centre he pursued work on this book project. Chris also contributed generously to China Heritage Quarterly and, with William Sima, was the co-guest editor of the last issue of that journal, the focus of which was The China Critic. He is also the editor of China’s Literary Cosmopolitans: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters (Brill, 2015) and Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays by Qian Zhongshu (Columbia, 2011), as well as being co-editor, with Nicolai Volland, of The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900-60 (UBC Press, 2015). Continue reading →

Source: LA Review of Books Blog (April 11, 2017)
Commemorating and Anti-Authoritarian Provocateur: Reflections on Wang Xiaobo (May 13, 1952-April 11, 19997)
By Sebastian Veg

Wang Xiaobo, an important Chinese literary and intellectual figure who died of a heart attack 20 years ago this week at the age of 44, remains largely unknown to the reading public outside China.  Only a few novellas and one important essay of his have been translated into English.  In China, by contrast, his popularity reached unprecedented heights in the late 1990s, and he was even included posthumously (with five other “emeriti”) on the first list of China’s 50 “most influential public intellectuals” published in 2004. Even now, his books are still reprinted and widely read: Changjiang Literature and Art has just published a new seven-volume selection of his writings to mark the anniversary of his death. Continue reading →

Poet Yu Xiuhua Visits Stanford University

Generously sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (the Confucius Institute), and co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Stanford University presents to you:

A Film about and Conversation with POET YU XIUHUA:  诗人余秀华对话斯坦福

Yu Xiuhua has been hailed as “China’s Emily Dickinson,” although she refuses the label, insisting that her singularity defies such comparisons. Having shared hundreds of poems on her blog, Yu rose to fame in 2014 when her poem “Crossing Over Half of China to Sleep with You” went viral online. She has since then published three best-selling books of poetry. Sensual, rebellious, at once lyrical and dark, her poetry often expresses a yearning for human connections. The public reception, however, has relentlessly exploited her disability (cerebral palsy) and rural background, labeling her as a “brain-paralyzed peasant poet.” In 2016, Fan Jian made a documentary film Still Tomorrow that chronicles Yu’s transformation from a farmer living in rural China to a public figure appearing on national TV shows; it also documents her struggle to end her 20-year-long arranged marriage. Still Tomorrow won the prestigious IDFA Special Jury Award for Feature-Length Documentary. Yu and Fan will come to Stanford for a poetry reading and film screening. And a roundtable discussion will look at how multiple minority identities such as gender, class, and disability intersect in Yu’s rise to national fame in the age of social media.

See film trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq3iN2P4toI Continue reading →

Source: China Daily (4/6/17)
Chinese sci-fic writer nominated for second Hugo Award
China Plus

Front cover of Death’s End, a third novel in Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past. [File photo]

Chinese writer Liu Cixin, who was the first Asian writer to win the award, was nominated again this year for Death’s End, a third novel in his trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Liu previously won the award in 2015 for the first book in the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem.

Experienced American science-fiction translator Ken Liu again helped Liu to translate Death’s End, as he did on The Three-Body Problem. Ken Liu’s English translation was considered a great contribution to Liu Cixin’s Hugo-Award winning novel in 2015. Continue reading →