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I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies
I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.
‘Generation after generation, people have lived in this massive sick ward we call the universe 'In the eighty fourth episode of the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, we are lost deep inside Hospital, the first entry in an abyssal trilogy by show favourite Han Song. Old-time wardmates Michael Berry and Mingwei Song are here too, groaning in the darkness.-// NEWS ITEMS //Tencent's Three Body Problem series arrives… on Youtube!A podcast interview w/ Yan Ge & Jeremy Tiang on Strange Beasts of ChinaBookshop.org puts out a Lunar New Year reading list
What does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) investigates the discursive construction of youth’s symbolic meanings and to explore how these meanings underlie the novelistic narrative of modern Chinese youths’ personal development. Song situates the study within a broader narrative of the emergence and development of the Chinese Bildungsroman in careful analyses of works like Wu Jianren’s The New Story of the Stone (with its figure of the old youth), Chen Duxiu’s New Youth journal, Ye Shengtao’s Ni Huanzhi, and the work of Ba Jin, Lu Ling, Lu Qiao, Yang Mo, Wang Meng, and much much more. The book concludes by looking at the contemporary science fiction of Liu Cixin. It’s fascinating work, well worth reading for anyone interested in modern Chinese literature and/or the history of youth! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) investigates the discursive... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) investigates the discursive construction of youth’s symbolic meanings and to explore how these meanings underlie the novelistic narrative of modern Chinese youths’ personal development. Song situates the study within a broader narrative of the emergence and development of the Chinese Bildungsroman in careful analyses of works like Wu Jianren’s The New Story of the Stone (with its figure of the old youth), Chen Duxiu’s New Youth journal, Ye Shengtao’s Ni Huanzhi, and the work of Ba Jin, Lu Ling, Lu Qiao, Yang Mo, Wang Meng, and much much more. The book concludes by looking at the contemporary science fiction of Liu Cixin. It’s fascinating work, well worth reading for anyone interested in modern Chinese literature and/or the history of youth! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) investigates the discursive construction of youth’s symbolic meanings and to explore how these meanings underlie the novelistic narrative of modern Chinese youths’ personal development. Song situates the study within a broader narrative of the emergence and development of the Chinese Bildungsroman in careful analyses of works like Wu Jianren’s The New Story of the Stone (with its figure of the old youth), Chen Duxiu’s New Youth journal, Ye Shengtao’s Ni Huanzhi, and the work of Ba Jin, Lu Ling, Lu Qiao, Yang Mo, Wang Meng, and much much more. The book concludes by looking at the contemporary science fiction of Liu Cixin. It’s fascinating work, well worth reading for anyone interested in modern Chinese literature and/or the history of youth! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) investigates the discursive... Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies
Ha Jin reads from his novel A Map of Betrayal, published in 2014. After his reading, Ha Jin discusses his work with Mingwei Song, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures. This event took place March 30, 2015 at Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities as part of the Newhouse Center Distinguished Writers Series. Born in China in 1956, Pulitzer nominated author Ha Jin was a teenager when China entered the Cultural Revolution. He became a member of the People’s Liberation Army at the age of fourteen. His novel Waiting, which won him the National Book Award in 1999, and the PEN/ Faulkner in 2000, was based on his experiences during his five-year service in the Red Army. He was awarded the PEN/ Faulkner again in 2005 for War Trash.
Film director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus spoke at Wellesley College on Saturday, October 26. “Ang Lee is one of the most important figures in Chinese cinema—and probably the most famous figure from Chinese cinema in the entire world,” said Mingwei Song, assistant professor of Chinese at Wellesley. Song’s work specializes in modern Chinese literature, film studies, and youth culture. Lee has won the Academy Award for Best Direction for Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Life of Pi (2012) and the Award for Best Foreign Language Film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) in addition to numerous prestigious prizes from European and Asian film festivals. Schamus is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, producer, and film executive, and a widely published film historian and theorist. His long collaboration as writer and producer for Ang Lee has resulted in 11 films, including Brokeback Mountain; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Ice Storm; The Wedding Banquet; The Hulk; Taking Woodstock and Lust, Caution. As moderator, Song asked questions of the pair exploring their collaboration and career together as well as film themes before turning the questions over to the audience. One theme that Song is excited to explore starts with the question, “Who is the tiger?” referencing the representation of the tiger in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Life of Pi.