Speaker
Prof. Sijia YAO
Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture, Soka University of America
Sijia Yao (Ph.D., Purdue University) is Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at Soka University of America and has previously taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has published articles on Chinese and comparative literature, film, music, and culture in journals such as The Comparatist, Comparative Literature Studies, and Tamkang Review. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang (University of Michigan Press, 2023).
Event Details
In her analysis of The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry treats pain as an experience without an object that leaves no space for creation. Because it reduces our consciousness to an exclusive focus on the body, pain according to Scarry “unmakes” the world, confining the sufferer within a tortured isolation. Yet not all pain is mute and destructive. Zhuang Yuxin’s 2007 film, Teeth of Love, sheds new light on bodily pain by analyzing it as an expression of intense passion. When pain is enacted voluntarily, pain can become a sign of love, thereby creating an event to engage with the world. In the film, pain becomes an indicator of the way in which private feelings intersect with public discourses in both the personal story of the protagonist and the historical transformation of Chinese society from the socialist era of politicized feelings to a neo-liberal era in which emotional life revolves around the nuclear family. The film’s depiction of the relationship between love and pain demonstrates in the end a convergence between China and Western societies with respect to the intensification of the family’s role as well as its crises.
Enquires
For enquiries, please contact CCS staff Mr. Aiden Chiu at aidenchiu17@cuhk.edu.hk.
We look forward to welcoming you to this event! Thank you.
