Faculty & Staff
Faculty
Paola Iovene, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in Chinese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
WB 301H
4-6827
Teaching/Research interests:
Twentieth-century Chinese literature, cinema, criticism, and intellectual history; theory and practice of the avant-garde; modernism and postmodernism; theories of national and world literature; narratology; literature’s relationship to other media; documentary film.
I am interested in the textual and social processes through which literature is made, particularly the intellectual debates, institutional transformations, and reading practices that shape Chinese contemporary literature. I am working on a book project on the category of “the literary” in contemporary China, which relates it to expectations of the future and notions of national and world literatures in the Chinese literary field since the 1950s. While emphasizing continuities in discourse and institutions, my work foregrounds the crucial role of literary editors and translators in shaping new textual practices. I am interested in debates on “word” and “image,” and in the ways in which contemporary Chinese writers and critics have written about the “intrinsic characteristics” of the Chinese language. I am also working on a project on the aesthetics of contemporary Chinese documentary film, focusing on the ways in which Chinese documentary filmmakers engage with questions of cinematic time. Other interests include postwar Chinese cinema, the links between cultural production and social action, theories, practices, and politics of translation, and Chinese travel writing.
Selected Publications:
“Phony Phoenixes: Comedy, Protest, and Marginality in Postwar Shanghai,” in Sherman Cochran and Paul Pickowicz eds, On the Margins of China. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2009 (in press).
“Why Is There a Poem in this Story? Contemporary Chinese Literature, Li Shangyin’s Poetry, and the Futures of the Past.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 19, 2 (Fall 2007): 71-116.
“Authenticity, Translation, and Postmodernity: Polemics around Han Shaogong’s Dictionary of Maqiao,” Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli 62 (2002), 197-218.
Courses:
- Chinese Independent Documentary Film (winter 2008)
- The Writer and the People in Modern Chinese Literature (spring 2008)
- Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction in Context (graduate, spring 2008)
- Communities, Media and Selves in Modern Chinese Literature (fall 2008)
- Uprooting and Displacement in Chinese Literature and Film (graduate, fall 2008)
- Contemporary Chinese Literature: Writers, Critics, and Institutions (winter 2009)
- Reading Cultures II: Travel (winter 2009)
