Professor Kwong Ho Yee Connie
Department of Chinese Language and Literature
Prof. Connie Kwong received her BA and MPhil in Chinese Language and Literature from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and her PhD in French and Comparative Literature from the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). She also got a master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Vincennes Saint-Denis (Paris VIII). She has been teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong since 2006. She was a visiting professor (enseignant-chercheur) at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) in France in 2014 and a visiting scholar at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy of Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 2019.
Prof. Kwong’s chief interest in research includes the Twentieth-century Chinese literature, literary theories and criticism, comparative literature as well as transcultural studies. She published her first monograph in French in 2011: Du Langage au Silence: l’évolution de la critique littéraire au XXème siècle. It carries out research into the evolution of literary theories in Europe and the translatability of theories between different cultures in the Twentieth-century. Her second monograph, Fanal Obscur: Chinese Modernists and European Leftist Literature and Art (2017), focusing on the period from the Chinese Great Revolution in 1927 to the end of the Second World War in 1945, makes an investigation into the relationship between the Chinese modernist literature and the European leftist literature and reveals the complexity and hybrid nature of Chinese literary modernity. Her recent book Shuttling between East and West: The Transcultural Dialogue of Contemporary and Modern Chinese Literature (2019) puts the emphasis on the relativity of the concepts of East and West in the studies of the Twentieth-century Chinese literature. It examines how Chinese writers re-define their own cities, literature and cultural position at a time when it was only correct and fashionable to talk about the binary oppositions such as East and West, Europe and Asia, Self and Others as well as Local and World. She has also compiled, edited and annotated Dai Wangshu’s Literary Translation Works in Hong Kong during the Second Sino-Japanese War (2014). These once-neglected source materials have since made complete a literary picture that, upon its completion, is able to tell the heterogeneity of Chinese modernist literature developed in the wartime period and the transmission of European literature in China in a transcultural context.

“Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux, de voir l’univers avec les yeux d’un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d’eux voit, que chacun d’eux est.
(The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.)”
Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu
Research Interests
- Twentieth-century Chinese Literature
- Literary Theories and Criticism
- Comparative Literature
- Transcultural Studies
Publications
Books Authored
- Du Langage au silence: l’évolution de la critique littéraire au XXème siècle [From Language to Silence: The Evolution of Literary Criticism in the 20th Century], Paris: L’Harmattan, coll. « Critiques littéraires », 2011 (Reprint in 2013 and 2014), 250p.
- 《黑暗的明燈:中國現代派與歐洲左翼文藝》[Fanal Obscur: Chinese Modernists and European Lefist Literature], Hong Kong: Commercial Press (HK) Limited, 2017, viii+360 pages.
- 《互為東西:中國現當代文學的跨文化對話》[Shuttling between East and West: Transcultural Dialogue of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature], Beijing: Zonghua Book Company, 2019, v+300 pages.
Books Edited
- 《戰火下的詩情:抗日戰爭時期戴望舒在港的文學翻譯》[Dai Wangshu’s Literary Translations in Hong Kong during the Second Sino-Japanese War], Hong Kong: Commercial Press (HK) Limited, 2014, iii+424 pages. (With a Critical Introduction and Notes)