CHC — An Object In Between: The Past and Present of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman”
CHC
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Date
25 Mar 2025
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Organiser
CHC
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Time
15:30 - 17:00
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Venue
PolyU Student Halls of Residence (Hung Hom) SHA102
Speaker
Prof. MA Xiaolu
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Summary
By interrogating how the original composition and textual reincarnations of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” manifest his idea of an “object in between,” this presentation celebrates an intertextual event in world literature. It traces how Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” came into being in conversation with preexisting literary creations and how the intertextual recasting of Lu Xun’s story both within and beyond the Sinophone world incorporates postcolonial contexts and recent cyberculture. The intertextuality not only calls for a dynamic negotiation with Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” but also involves unexpected engagement with the literary antecedents to Lu Xun’s work. By examining the transculturation of cannibalism and insanity in the works of Lu Xun, Liang Wern Fook, Ōe Kenzaburō, and Leonid Andreev, among others, this presentation reveals how “Diary of a Madman” as an object in between projects a vision of a future that resists the pressures of historical impasse.
Keynote Speaker
Prof. MA Xiaolu
Xiaolu Ma is assistant professor in the Division of Humanities at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She engages in research in the interrelationship of trans-Eurasian literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia via Japan (1880–1930) (Harvard University Asia Center, 2024). Her research articles have been published or are forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals, including JAS, PMLA, Modern Language Quarterly, Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Twentieth-Century China, among others.
