The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events

Art: »Coiling Dragons in the Clouds« (2022) by PENG Kang-long, courtesy of the artist

Registration and participation
Participation on spot
Venue: Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg

Please register until May 16, 2024:
anmeldung@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de
We will record your registration, but do not send a confirmation of registration.

Participation via Zoom
For the Zoom registration link, please click here

About the lecture
Gao Xingjian is a Chinese-born writer and artist who lives in exile in France. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. His play Snow in August is based on the life of Huineng (February 27, 638 – August 28, 713), the Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism and founder of the Sudden Enlightenment School. Drawn from Huineng’s Platform Sutra and various koan cases, the play showcases Gao’s nonconformist poetics, transforming classical notions of acting, dramaturgy, and theatricality, particularly from Beijing Opera, while simultaneously embodying his politics of resistance. The 2002 premiere production of Snow in August in Taipei, directed by Gao Xingjian himself, was an extravaganza.

Intending to explore two core aspects of Gao’s practice in Snow in August, namely, the politics of resistance and nonconformist poetics, I will pose questions such as: Is Huineng, an illiterate Chinese Zen Buddhist master, a religious nonconformist and also a freewheeling political thinker? Is Huineng’s life an embodiment of Gao Xingjian’s self-exile, anti-establishment thinking, and politics of resistance? Is the portrayal of Huineng in the production a successful manifestation of Gao’s nonconformist poetics?

About the speaker
Tsu-Chung Su is Distinguished Professor of English at National Taiwan Normal University. His areas of interest include Nietzsche and his French legacy, theories of hysteria and melancholia, Shakespeare studies, performance studies, Indology, dramatic theory and criticism, and theories of consciousness and mindfulness. Su is the author of three monographs: Artaud Event Book (2018, in Chinese), The Anatomy of Hysteria: What It is, with Some of the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Representations, & Several Critiques of It (2004), and The Writing of the Dionysian: The Dionysian in Modern Critical Theory (1995). – In May 2024 he is a Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University Frankfurt.

About the lecture series
In recent years, literary and cultural works that evoke the cultural memories of classical Chinese traditions are gaining popularity in the global Sinitic-languages space and cyberspace. From literary to visual culture, from pop music to fashion, from state policies to daily rituals, these classicist articulations present Chineseness as complicated, multifaceted, multilingual, and cross-cultural. They raise important questions on the relevance of Chinese traditions today to China, to global Chinese communities, and to a future of »world literature«—as Goethe envisioned it nearly two centuries ago. In this multiannual lecture series, prominent scholars, writers, and artists will present fascinating case studies from their research or draw upon their aesthetic practices to elaborate on their understanding on these important questions. Such investigations demonstrate the abundant aesthetic and intellectual resources that the vast repertoire of Chinese cultural memories may provide to engage in a dialogue on the present and future of a global culture.

Concept of the lecture series: Zhiyi Yang, Professor of Sinology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften