Distinguished Lectures in Humanities: Sinofuturism: The Three-Body Trilogy and Crisis Civilizationism

Abstract

This talk filters LIU Cixin’s celebrated Three-Body trilogy through the lens of civilizationism—a new way of imagining the global order along civilizational, rather than national, lines. I delve into the ways in which space opera sci-fi and the discourse of civilizational identity dovetail at the cognitive-psychological level to assess the mobilizational potential of civilizationism. My overall goal is to shed light on an aspect of Chinese civilizational discourse that is difficult to glean from official pronouncements and yet underscores both its disarming appeal and worrying blend of cultural Darwinism, IR realism, and techno-authoritarianism, or what may be called Sinofuturism. My secondary goal is to account for Chinese sci-fi’s breakthrough achievement in winning favor with the state, the critics (domestic and abroad), and global mass readership—a feat no other genre of Chinese literature has ever accomplished.

I then shift from a defensive to a proactive stance, identifying crucial ‘insider issues’ that require further research and debate to advance the field. A framework of ten pivotal questions is presented, covering fundamental practical and theoretical concerns. These include the ongoing challenge of defining a ‘task’, developing robust methods for measuring task performance and language learning, and establishing criteria for task selection and sequencing. Other vital areas explored are the structure of task-based lessons (pre-/post-task stages), the role of explicit instruction and focus on form, accommodating individual learner differences, and—critically—the importance teacher preparation for TBLT. I conclude by acknowledging that while TBLT is firmly grounded in theory, it remains a work in progress. Its continued evolution depends on closing the gap between research and practice and call for more ecologically valid, longitudinal, and teacher-led research that affirms TBLT’s core principle: creating authentic links between classroom learning and real-world language use.

About the speaker

Haiyan LEE is the Walter A. Haas Professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950 (Stanford, 2007), winner of the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (Stanford, 2014), and A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination (Chicago, 2023). Her research and teaching interests include modern Chinese literature and popular culture; literature's relations with philosophy, law, and anthropology; cognitive literary studies; affect studies; the nonhuman and environmental humanities.