Resource：http://en.shisu.edu.cn/resources/events/lecture/translating-fragments-disorientation-in-shanghai-dancing
Speaker: Wang Guanglin (Shanghai University of International Business and Economics)
Date: March 17, 2015 – Tuesday
Time: 18:30-20:30
Venue: R604, Shaw Library, Hongkou Campus
Language: Chinese, English
Summary: This talk uses the anti-modernist insights of Walter Benjamin’s work on translation and the fragment to illuminate the East and West interface at work in Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing. It argues that the 21st century theory of translation applies, today, to “global” migratory experience and, in Castro’s post-novel, enables a different writing of place and time than either modernist or postmodern practices. Benjamin’s paradoxical figure of “pure language” — understood as material marks and sound that traverse any language—may also illuminate where Chinese script haunts today’s alphabetic, Western literary imaginary. In Castro’s remarkable work, “Shanghai,” as name and place, becomes the non-site for this global dis-orientation of experience and memory.
Speaker Biography: Dr. Wang Guanglin is professor of English and Dean of School of Foreign Languages at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics (SUIBE). He is also the chair of the Center for Australian Studies at SUIBE. His research interests include Australian literature, Intercultural communication. In 2012, he was awarded the national translation prize by the Australian government. He was granted Honorary Fellowship by the University of Central Lancashire in 2014.
