Approaching Literature: The Historicist and/or the Presentist

This lecture will be co-hosted by the Literature Team of the School of Foreign Studies and the SUFE Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture

 讲座摘要/ Abstract 

In this talk, the speaker starts with a review of the “traditional” way of looking at literature, a basically historicist one that focuses more or less on the “historical contexts” of various kinds. Then he contrasts historicist criticisms with “the presentist” way of approaching literature, elaborating on the nature of presentist criticism, the challenge it poses to historicist criticism, its significance for contemporary literary education and study, including some problems of which we have to be aware. Throughout the talk, the speaker will cite cases from contemporary Shakespeare criticism to support his observations and argument.

 主讲人简介/ CV 

Zhang Chong is currently Lecturing Professor of English at Xiamen University. He has taught at Nanjing University and Fudan University. Professor Zhang earned his Ph.D. from Nanjing University in 1989, with Dramatic Irony in Shakespeare and Yuan Drama; post-doc (1991) at Harvard on Renaissance and Shakespeare; Fulbright research scholar (2002) at UPenn & UC Berkeley. He has published extensively on Shakespeare and British-American literature. Major works, in Chinese, include Topics on Shakespeare (2004), Shakespeare in Visual Age (2010), Exploring Shakespeare (2012), From Margin to Center: A History of Native American Literature (2014), and The Dramatic Shakespeare (2019).

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