第8講　6月6日（金）

張 旭東（ニューヨーク大学、比較文学・東アジア研究）
「The Personal Voice in What It Is To Be Classical: The Essay As Form And Content in World Literature」

The rise of the modern essay is an historical event with profound social and humanistic implications.  While the primacy of the private individual, the expressivity of the free mind and the immediacy of vernacular reason mark a clear departure of the modern essay as a product of and response to modernity, the genre’s continuity with and reinvention of what is considered to be classical (now a category forever entangled with its relationship to modernity) remains to be analyzed and interpreted across linguistic and cultural contexts in which the modern essay firmly established itself as a privileged—though sometimes marginalized—style.  By re-reading Lu Xun, the foremost essayist of modern China, the talk seeks to connect one of the youngest members of the world republic of modern letters to its older ones in Europe.  At the same time, by revisiting the political and aesthetic radicalism of the Chinese Vernacular Revolution, the author also argues that its modernity and modernism are profoundly and tortuously linked to and informed by the Chinese classical traditions, which are kept alive by their continuous disruption, subversion and negation.