AAS 2011

Ah, Hawai'i, land of long shiny tables, potted indoor ferns, and bland leaders in pantsuits

I worked a good portion of the day on a proposal for a panel on Chinese writing for the 2011 meeting of AAS (the Association for Asian Studies). It's a lot of annoying red tape, and there is no guarantee our panel will be selected, but it does make me feel ever so professional. Delegating, being a team-player, coming up with ideas, keeping in touch with scholars...

Panel abstract: Chinese Prose Today - The Discursive Power of Sanwen

Chinese prose retains a unique power to serve and shape readers of all ages and all classes. In books, literary journals and on the internet, non-fictional prose writing is the central platform for discourse about the individual, communities, and the environment. But what role does prose writing have in the massive changes taking place in China and around the world today? How does Chinese prose writing serve its diverse and mercurial readership? This panel takes steps to answer these questions by bringing together recent work on the themes, genres, and modes of Chinese prose, along with the theoretical challenges that prose presents. We aim to map prose writing as a diverse art that crosses multiple boundaries including those between fiction and non-fiction, as well as tradition and modernity. Chinese prose reconsidered just might offer the model for a consciousness that celebrates the world in all its multiplicity by portraying the specific attachments that illustrate empathy towards each other and the world they live in. By putting the manifestations of this empathy at the center of our readings of Chinese prose, we push towards a fuller evaluation of the prospects and pitfalls of writing in China.

My Abstract:

The Biographical Essay and Communities of Affect: The Vocabulary of the Empathic Civilization

How do human beings attain a consciousness that is collective and empathic, trans-personal and trans-local? This question, which gains so much urgency in the face of an ever-more densely-connected world population, has been the concern of Chinese prose writers during every period of China's century of revolution. And one literary form they have always turned to is the biographical essay. Now gaining wider attention as the flagship form of the larger field of Chinese "life writing" or "auto/biography" (zhuanji wenxue), biographical prose that takes as its object the life course of representative, exemplary individuals has served Chinese writers looking to change social values.

In this paper I will demonstrate the broad continuity of the biographical essay by defining the "portrait" as the basic unit of expression in major essays of both the early 1960s and of the 1990s. I will also summarize the role of the "portrait" in critical conversations in 1961 (the "year of prose") and in the early 1990s (a period of "prose fever"). What emerges in this examination of "the portrait" is the central role of the exemplary life in building communities of affect in Chinese writing. I argue that, despite wild swings between ideological and subjective, the central concern of Chinese prose remained the same: to provide a discourse of affect that can help readers organize and appropriate sensual memories of crises past, to bring readers together to face the future.


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My Teaching Philosophy, Second Draft

In Ancient Greece, aspiring teachers had to do these elaborate courtship dances, just as we do today in America (I'm kidding. Sort of.)

Teaching Philosophy: Language and Literature

In everything I do, I believe in asking questions, I believe in pursuing what is right and true, and I believe that life is best seen as a never-ending process of making new connections. I am completely committed to passing these beliefs down to future generations, and the way I do this is by teaching language and literature. Language is the basic tool of communication without which there can be no commerce and no progress. Literature is language as art, and belongs in conversation with the other arts such as dance, theater, visual arts, and music. As a language and literature teacher, I work together with the other teachers of the arts and humanities to expand the imaginative power of people, but my special ability is helping students gain the power to listen and speak for themselves.

Giving Students the Power to Speak I: Language. The whole world over, the traditional first step to connect students to other times and other places is to teach them a foreign language. I love teaching Chinese, and first-year Chinese in particular, because when students grapple with the four tones of Mandarin, or take up the brush to draw Chinese characters, they face a big gap between what they have known before and what is to come. I get to see them crossing that gap multiple times every day. I also love to teach English, my native language and the language of all the people, places and things that are most familiar to me. Teaching English offers up the story and the spirit of the English-speaking people, and I am proud to be a part of that story and that spirit. In both cases, students and teachers work together in a progressive, graduated course of improvement that leaves everyone with a more sophisticated and more adaptive vision of what language and culture and society really are. Once students have this vision, they take it with them in whatever they do next, because they have begun to understand the value of making connections.

Giving Students the Power to Speak II: Literature. Literature is the art of listening and telling. Literature in the classroom involves two reciprocal activities: reading and writing. When I teach literature, I make my students listen, and I make my students read. Then I make them tell, and I make them write. And then we start again. My literature classroom is an interactive workshop experience that aims to give students the power to speak for themselves. On the one hand, we ask questions about what we read and hear, we analyze the parts of what we read, and we learn the history of what we read. At the same time that we do this, we produce papers with beginnings, middles and ends. We write in complete sentences. And we learn to write with style.

The Great Multiplicity of World Cultures. Whether I’m teaching courses in Chinese literature and Asian studies or in Freshman composition and basic research techniques, I teach that literature’s great power is to tell the story of how we live and how we die, what we value and what we ignore, what we love and what we fear. As an American scholar of Chinese literature and culture, I make sure that the underlying lesson in all my courses is that there is great value in crossing borders, listening to others, and making connections. My greatest hope is that my students leave my classroom with a sensitivity to the delicate balance of human life, the perils we face in the world today, and the need to call on all our talents and traditions to form and preserve healthy, sustainable communities all over the earth.

Truth and Beauty. I do not value all literature equally. I discriminate towards the stories that have the power to move the reader, the depth to challenge the listener, and the tension, conflict and crisis that call out to us always to examine, understand, and question our values. My students meet an opinionated person of taste with an eye for quality and craftsmanship in his art, and I have found that they love to share in the great conversation on what is good, what is not, and where to find more good stuff. I teach great books from the Chinese and Western traditions, but I also teach film and television shows, letters, diaries and blogs, graphic novels -- powerful stories in any form, and especially stories of great beauty that resonate with the students and inspire them to seek truth in their own, unique ways.

Investment in the Institution. I want an active, transparent position in whatever institution I serve, so that I can make sure that I am fully engaged in my institution’s strategic plan for growth and development. I need leadership that understands the role of the humanities and the value of asking big questions about life, communities, and what we owe to each other as human beings. And as a teacher, I pledge to invest in my institution on a holistic level with a view to helping student learning – this may mean taking extra time to teach basic skills, or developing curriculum in collaboration with other faculty members, or adjusting my teaching to better fit within the larger university community. Good teachers need good schools.

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Week 10: More Anxiety

"Sweeping away illiteracy," China, 1952. From what looks like a nice article on literacy programs.

Last week, I failed to finish my translation once again -- I have a terrible block on it, there's no avoiding it. It's not that I don't know how to translate it, it's just that I can't sit down and work on it. A psychological problem revealing itself. Anxiety about working on my dissertation, clearly!

That ends this week. Goals: finish the translation, at least 5,000 words onto my dissertation (caveat: that means probably 500 words that will be salvageable in the end).

I'm also going to work in film and book reviews here as I feel necessary. This is motivated by the McKee seminar, of course, and my interest in documenting as much of my experience of story as possible.
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Week 9: Anxiety Time

I return from the desert outpost ready to serve.

Well, spring break 2010 may not have been the most enjoyable experience, but it was the most educational. No strike that -- despite its ups and downs, this was the best spring break ever, I think.

I return from the McKee story seminar with too much work and not enough time. And that seems just about right to develop my story. Its a timeless tale of a quest to succeed against all odds, one that reinforces the most basic values: discipline, hard work. It could almost be mundane or trivial, but because I know how to avoid repetition, how focus in sharply on the turning points in the struggle, there is the powerful sense that this a fight with real risks that is nevertheless worth carrying on. We can be heroes!

Goals this week:

1. Submit registration for IABA Conference.
Finish Yang Jiang translation, making a quick Step Outline along the way
2. Keep going over my notes on Story and keep it active in the mind....
3. Finish final editing of the classical poetry paper

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Week of March 17

Scene from Adaptation dramatizing the McKee story seminar. Never thought when I first saw this film that I would take the seminar!

It's spring break at the University. Goals for me:

1. Finish fellowship application (check!)
2. Finish the Yang Jiang Translation (probably not possible, but one must keep trying)
3. Put in some time at the Tretter Collection (check!)
4. Keep reading classical poems. I have in mind now a story that would use the Qingli-era poetry I've been looking at. Something that would really sum up the "spirit of the age." (those are both direct quotes and air quotes)
5. Attend the Robert McKee story seminar. That's my spring break activity this year! I just wish I had more of a Nicholas Cage look for this.


6. Keep up the "career search project" together with A.

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Raising Taxes

Fareed Zakaria says we can fix the deficit by taxing a bit more

Personally, I like Zakaria's reasoning, and I think he's calculating he can attract some momentum for tax increases now. The same idea is expressed in his column from last week. As a job seeker, this is yet another issue I must now follow carefully if I want consider my decision about where to live and work a responsible one.

Stress!

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Places to Get a Job

"There are so many ways to serve eggs at breakfast" : A Lesson at UIC

A really exciting article published earlier this year from the Chronicle gives me several places to start looking for jobs, including a new private liberal arts school. This school UIC in Zhuhai is definitely worth pursuing! Click here to watch the staff recruitment video, which has some hilarious scenes of foreign teachers describing their work there.

Brave new world.

How would I get a job at such a place? Here's a profile of Morton Holbrook, an old internationalist-lawyer who is now on the faculty there (and no doubt the administration as well).

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