Yueling Ji

yj
Teaching Fellow in the Humanities, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Wieboldt 406
PhD, University of Chicago, 2023
Research Interests: Modern Chinese Literature

Biography

My research centers around the methodology and history of Chinese literary criticism. I am especially interested in the connections between modern literary criticism in Chinese, English, and Russian languages (concerning, for example, New Criticism, or Russian Formalism, or socialist realist theories); I also pay much attention to the lasting influence of Classical Chinese poetics on modern Chinese intellectuals. More specifically, my current project focuses on the judgment of style in literary criticism. It is based on my dissertation, “A History of Style: Literary Criticism in Cold War China.”

My study of literary criticism is motivated by both an intellectual historical aim and a practical one. At the practical level, a better understanding of the history of criticism can help us identify better tools for literary studies today. So far, building on the study of style, I have adopted a stylistic approach to analyze modern Chinese writing. I work on Lu Xun, modern fiction about early China, and Russian-Chinese translation.

In 2023-24, I am teaching in the Media Aesthetics sequence (Image and Text) of the Humanities Core and serving as the preceptor for senior thesis writers in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. The relationship between pedagogy and criticism is an important topic in my research; among other things, I have written about the pedagogy of literature at the middle school level in China and the Soviet Union.