Faculty & Staff
Faculty
Paola Iovene, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in Chinese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
WB 301H
2-5813
Teaching/Research interests:
Twentieth-century Chinese literature, cinema, criticism, and intellectual history; theory and practice of the avant-garde; documentary film; translation.
I am interested in the processes through which texts become literature, particularly the intellectual debates, institutional transformations, and reading practices that shape “Chinese contemporary literature.” I have worked on such authors as Han Shaogong, Ma Yuan, Ge Fei, Mo Yan, and Sun Ganlu, paying particular attention to questions of nativism and to the intertextual allusions to Chinese classical and foreign literatures in their works. My current research on Chinese avant-garde fiction from the 1980s to the present relates it to changing notions of national and world literatures, and foregrounds the crucial role of literary editors. I have also developed an interest in Chinese documentary cinema, especially in the ways contemporary documentarians have been reclaiming an avant-garde position by embracing a poetics of marginality and loss. On the side, I am working on a smaller project on audiences’ responses to humorous film representations in late 1940s Shanghai. Other interests include the theories, practices, and politics of translation and Chinese twentieth-century travel writing.
Selected Publications:
“Authenticity, Translation, and Postmodernity: Polemics around Han Shaogong’s Dictionary of Maqiao,” Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli 62 (2002), 197-218.
“Why is there a Poem in this Story? Li Shangyin’s Poetry, Contemporary Chinese Literature, and the Futures of the Past.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, forthcoming.
