A discussion group at Douban is talking about the Chinese version of The Hypothetical Mandarin, and sent along a few questions for me to answer. Responses here. Review/discussion of the book here.
Just a quick rundown of the various trips and visits: Bremen (Jacobs University), 23-24 October 2013 Seoul (EALLK Keynote), 5-10 November 2013 Mainz, 17 December 2013 MLA (Chicago), 9-12 January 2014 Hamburg, 15-16 January 2014 Göttingen, 17-20 February 2014 ACLA … Continue reading
Below the draft syllabus for the course I’ll be teaching in the Winter semester (Oct 15 – Feb 4) at the University of Heidelberg. Brief description:
Every idea of the modern includes a concept of the primitive. Primitive humans, we are told, inhabited a world without self-consciousness: in daily life, no gap between action and belief (Mircea Eliade); in aesthetics, no “representation,” only presentation (Heidegger); and in history, no fracture between the event and its possibility (Hegel). This course ranges across many of the central theorizations of modernity in order to ask questions about the nature of our contemporary self-understanding as moderns.
See more for the daily reading schedule, assignments, and so on. Continue reading
Siobhan Phillips has a long review of On Literary Worlds up at the LA Review of Books. The first paragraph made my heart quake a bit, but it gets easier to bear (if you’re me) from there on, and in the long … Continue reading
I will be spending the 2013-14 academic year in Heidelberg, Germany, at the Karl Jaspers Center for Advanced Transcultural Studies at the University of Heidelberg. I’ll be teaching a course in the MA in Transcultural Studies program (“What is Self-Consciousness? Primitivism, Deception, … Continue reading
Some people think MOOCs are bad, some people think they’re good (though I know almost none of the latter). But what you really need to know is: what’s going to happen to the university in the next twenty years as … Continue reading
So let’s be clear: satellite radio is MUCH MUCH better than regular radio. If you drive as part of your job you should get satellite radio immediately. That said something you probably didn’t know is that satellite radio has a … Continue reading
Carla Nappi interviewed me a couple weeks ago about On Literary Worlds for New Books in Literary Studies. We actually did the interview twice; the first time, in March, sound problems made the audio unlistenable. Second time turned out better, Carla … Continue reading
For the LA Review of Books, a review of two recent collections of Claude Levi-Strauss’s thoughts on Japan: TIME MAKES US ALL ANACHRONISMS to ourselves. As we get older, we are all left behind by a history we had once … Continue reading
A graduate short course on how to write in scholarly genres, mainly focused on articles. Continue reading
I’ll be giving a keyonte at Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s first annual Asian Studies Undergraduate Research Conference, title “Who’s Afraid of China?” One of the pleasures of writing the talk was the opportunity to go back to these sentences, which I … Continue reading
Working my way through Conor Friedersdorf’s collection of 2012′s best nonfiction, I have come across a piece by Joshua Foer on a man named John Quijada, who has invented a language, Ithkuil, that attempts to fulfill the age-old dream of a … Continue reading
Honestly, I couldn’t bear to watch all the way through, but true masochists will enjoy this over and over: Source: Printculture
Useful and interesting discussion at China File on “airpocalypse now.” Quote from Alex Wang to set up the discussion: My own view is that China’s tipping point, in a sense, already arrived a few years ago. But the official response … Continue reading
…is apparently less fluid than we tend to think. A really useful piece from the Economist updates us with the latest research from a variety of social scientists, and also–incredibly usefully–includes links to all the research it cites. Money quote: … Continue reading
