Emerging Feminist Research on Asia. Speaker Series presents:

In Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon, Clara Iwasaki looks at the global connections woven into the modern Chinese literature canon with a focus on translation and migration. Texts, writers, and characters appear in different languages, sometimes taking markedly different forms. Authors translate and translators become authors. When individual texts are read in the context of their language or country of origin, these valences of meaning become lost. As such, Iwasaki focuses on the relationship between different works and how these texts acquire meaning when read in relation to each other. It is in reading clusters of texts together that these hidden relationship to other writers, other languages, and other texts become visible. Following transpacific circuits, these writers and texts move not simply from periphery to center, or from obscurity to canon, but back and forth between literary, linguistic, and national communities.