Talk: A Family Romance: Specters of Incest in Eileen Chang’s Heart Sutra (1943)

This lecture focuses on Eileen Chang’s Xinjing, The Heart Sutra to map and understand the ways in which the author depicted different types of emotional, erotic, sexual, and psychological flows and exchanges between parents, children, and their partners and spouses. Xinjing will be here read in conversation with a wide array of other sources, first and foremost the mid – and late – Qing literary heritage that so greatly occupied and influenced Eileen Chang’s own literary universe and pursuits, as well as the westernized literary milieu in which she lived and operated in 1940s Shanghai.

Paola Zamperini is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University.

Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, The East Asia Center, Department of Comparative Literature, Mellichamp Global Dynamics Initiative