You are cordially invited to FHSS - DLC Lecture Series organized by the Department of Languages and Cultures (DLC), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS).
Details of the lectures are as follows:
Topic: Modernism and the Observant Eye
Speaker: Dr. Nan Zhang, Associate Professor of English Literature, the University of Hong Kong
Time: 13:00-14:30, 20th March 2024
Venue: T2-102
Abstract:
This talk explores how modernism’s experimentation with artistic expression champions nuanced ways of seeing the world. Drawing examples from a wide array of works by writers and art critics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it calls for a renewal of attention to the intellectual, aesthetic, and experiential possibilities of a heightened sense of observation. While modernism’s emphasis on the observant eye is not unprecedented, its commitment to the cultivation of perception shows much singularity. The talk concludes with an analysis of Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of Lily Briscoe’s Chinese eyes and Roger Fry’s conception of artistic vision, highlighting the complex interplay between in-sight and self-understanding.
Biography:
Dr. Nan Zhang is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. in English Literature from Johns Hopkins University, and her B.A. in International Finance from Fudan University. She has published a book on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and is finishing her second monograph on modernism’s engagement with various forms of virtue. Her articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Literature Compass, Modernist Cultures, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor of the “Global Circulation Project (GCP)” at Literature Compass and serves on the editorial board of the Bloomsbury Academic books series “Historicizing Modernism.” Nan Zhang has been awarded international fellowships for her research, including the 2020 Humanities Research Centre Fellowship at the Australian National University and British Academy Seed Funding in 2019. She is a co-founder and currently chair of the Modernist Studies in Asia (MSIA) research network.
