Date: Tuesday 26 April 2022
Time: 12.00pm-1.00pm AEST
Location: Online event
In this talk Dr Will Gatherer will provide an overview of his recently published work, Ma Yuan: The Chinese Avant-Garde, Metafiction, and Post-Postmodernism, the most comprehensive study to date on one of China’s most influential contemporary authors. In this monograph Will Gatherer offers a reappraisal of the role Ma Yuan played in the rise of postmodern fiction within China and offers new interpretive possibilities for the avant-garde movement of the 1980s through demonstrating that rather than being predominantly “formalist word games” or “narrative traps,” Ma Yuan’s works of metafiction functioned as Foucauldian “heterotopias” that created distinctly postmodern and post-socialist “possible worlds.” This work also analyzes Ma Yuan’s recent post-2000 output and, in doing so, explores the shifting dynamics of literary self-reflexivity and the “post-postmodern” in Chinese literature. In this book it is argued that Ma Yuan’s recent works display a distinct movement toward “metamodern” aesthetics alongside a rising anthropocenic awareness and eco- consciousness that offer key insights into the Chinese post-postmodern condition.
About the speaker:
Dr Will Gatherer is a lecturer in Chinese at the University of Queensland and a practicing Chinese English translator. Having completed his BA (Hons) from the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) in London, Will worked in Beijing at the British Embassy and then subsequently completed his PhD at the University of Queensland. Will currently conducts research on Chinese literary studies with a particular focus on the ‘Post-postmodern’ within a Chinese context.
“Talks in Chinese Humanities” are co-presented by the China Studies Centre, the Department of Chinese Studies, the Australian Society for Asian Humanities and the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at UNSW.