Spring 2021 Seminar
Andrew Kauffman, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Macalester College
“Ascending the Cross: The Image of Christs’ Crucifixion in Ai Qing’s Poetry”
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
4:45 p.m.
Western and Chinese scholars have emphasized the profound influences of Christian culture and the Bible on modern Chinese literature. Yet little has been written about the desires and anxieties embedded within Chinese artists’ appropriation and adaptation of the Gospel story of Jesus’s persecution and death. This talk will address this gap by focusing on how the renowned leftist poet Ai Qing 艾青 (1910-1996) creatively weaved Gospel terminology, symbolism, and imagery associated with Jesus’s crucifixion into his early poetry. I argue that for Ai Qing, as well as for many other intellectuals and writers of the Republican period, the story of Jesus’s martyrdom resonated on a profoundly person al level, serving as a vital site through which to ruminate on questions of selfhood, nationhood, and the position of the intellectual in relation to society.
Fall 2021 Seminar
Rivi Handler-Spitz, Associate Professor and Chair, Asian Languages and Cultures, Macalester College
“Corrosive Pedagogy in Early Modern China”
Thursday, September 23, 2021
4:40 p.m.
