CONFERENCES

The Program organizes and sponsors in collaboration with Chinese universities two major international conferences in 2005

International Conference on Literature and Visual Culture: Perspectives from China and the U.S., Duke University
October 6-8, 2006

International Conference on Chinese Television and Globalization, Duke University, October 28-29, 2005

International Conference on Ethnic Cultures and Society in Western China, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China, June 2-6, 2005

International Conference on

Literature and Visual Culture: Perspectives from China and the U.S.

Duke University
October 6-8, 2006

Significance China has a long tradition of literary culture and it has rapidly embraced electronically transmitted visual culture in the recent decades. The modern media for visual culture, such as film, television, and the Internet, have been invented in the United States , which as a young nation of immigrants prides itself on a culture of diversity rather than longevity. A comparative perspective on literature and literary studies in both China and the U.S. will shed significant light on the role of literature in today's world of information revolution, visual culture, and globalization.

Scope, Scale, and Location

The International Conference on Literature and Visual Culture: Perspectives from China and the U.S. will be held on October 6-8, 2006 at Duke University . It aims to examine literature's status in both China and the U.S. , inviting leading scholars in literature, cultural and media studies from both countries. The Program in Chinese Media and Communication will be the main organizer. The Center for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Tsinghua University , China , will serve as an international co-sponsor. About 20 participants, 10 from China and 10, the U.S. , will be invited.

The Duke conference will be the fourth U.S.-China symposium on comparative litera ture, a collaborative endeavor that began more than twenty years ago. The first symposium convened in Beijing in 1983, when China began to revive its cultural and literary tradition and reinvent a new, modern culture at once. The second conference was held at Princeton and Indiana University respectively in 1987, and the third at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2001. Among the distinguished American scholars, Richard Brodhead attended the conference at Tsinghua, which will confer an honorary doctorate to Brodhead in 2006.

The Duke conference will not only continue this valuable forum between Chinese and American scholars but expand the themes and subjects in a significant way. The first two conferences were attended by primarily scholars of literature and focused on literature's central role in culture and society, during the decade of the 1980s when literature emerged as the dominant form of cultural, and political representation in China . The Tsinghua conference in 2001, however, with a central theme of “globalizing comparative literature,” inaugurated a new phase of scholarly exchanges addressing a broader variety of issues than the first two.

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Objectives and Goals

The conference will bring interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on the issues facing literature and literary studies today: interactions and cross-fertilizations of visual and verbal cultural forms across language and cultural boundaries. Issues to be addressed will include:

• How does literature interact with different forms of visual culture?

• Which cultural and political processes shape the production, transmission and consumption of literature?

• What is the role of the market with respect to literary production and consumption?

• How adequate are the theories and approaches used in the study of literature in communicating with the field of Cultural Studies and other disciplines of humanities and social sciences ?

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Appendix: Proposed Participants of the Conference on Literature and Visual Culture: Perspectives from China and the U.S.

From China :

Wang Ning (literature and cultural studies, Tsinghua University );
Li Xiguang (media studies, Tsinghua University );
Chen Yongguo(cultural studies, Tsinghua University );
Luo Xuanmin (cultural studies, Tsinghua University )
Wang Fengzhen ( literature and philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) ;
Zhou Xian ( visual culture and aesthetics, Nanjing University ) ;
Hu Yamin (literature, Huazhong Normal University )
Tao Dongfeng ( media and cultural studies; Capital Normal University ) ;
Ye Shuxian ( cultural anthropology and ethnography, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) ;
Zhou Ning (literature, Xiamen University )
Yin Jinan (art history, visual culture, Chinese Central Institute of Fine Arts).

From the U.S. :

Richard Brodhead (Duke);
Fredric Jameson (literature , Duke);
Janice Radway (literature , Duke);
Walter Mignolo (literature , Duke);
Jane Gaines (film studies and literature , Duke);
Kenneth Surin (literature , Duke);
Susan Willis (literature , Duke);
Negar Mottahedeh (literature , Duke);
David Paletz (media and political sciences, Duke);
Kang Liu ( Chinese cultural and media studies, Duke); ;
Michael Holquist ( literature, Yale U niversity ) ;
Yuejing Wang (art history, visual culture, Harvard University );
Tonglin Lu (film studies and visual culture, University of Montreal )
Gary Xu ( film studies and visual culture, University of Illinois , Urbana-Champaign)

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