Today, we begin a quick mini series on a pair of poems. Both poems are titled "Water Dragon Chant," the first is by Zhang Jie, the latter by Su Dongpo. The latter was written in response to the first one. Both choose a specific kind of flower as their subject. This week, Lee and Rob debate whether Zhang Jie's poem is a nasty poem about that uses flower petals as metaphors for sperm and skeeting (please do not google this term).
This week, we are honored to get Megan Walsh on the podcast. She is the author of The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why It Matters, an excellent survey of Chinese literature today that was recently published as a part of the Columbia Global Reports. Megan was kind enough to share her insights into the state of contemporary Chinese literature with Rob and Lee.
Today, we interview Professor Roy Chan. Professor Chan is not only one of the most interesting thinkers trying to tackle Lu Xun in the American academia, but he is also the mentor of both Lee and Rob. Professor Chan is the author of The Edge of Knowing, an exploration dreams in the work of Lu Xun and other 20th Century Chinese writers. Today, Professor Chan discusses one of Lu Xun's most enigmatic works, Wild Grass.
What is a Zawen? It is complicated. In this episode, we try to tackle what zawen are and what they meant to Lu Xun's career. Guiding us on our journey is Professor Andrew Jones of UC Berkeley, one of the most well-regarded scholars of Lu Xun in American academia. Professor Jones is the author of Developmental Fairy Tales, and is a contributing translator to the new collection of Lu Xun's zawen in a book titled Jottings Under Lamplight.
On Today's podcast, we have one of the best writers on contemporary Chinese youth, Alec Ash. Alec wrote an excellent book on Chinese young adults called Wish Lanterns. It was renamed China's New Youth for the American book market. Alec joins us today on the podcast to talk about one of Lu Xun's shortest stories. We debate how close Lu Xun is to the narrator of the story and what it says about the China of the early 20th and early 21st Century.
One of Lu Xun's most trenchant stories, in this episode, part of our series on Lu Xun, we tackle a story about gender, rape and class. The story is brutal, one of Lu Xun's masterpieces.
Blood and Bread. A national reckoning between two mourning mothers. Today, Rob and Lee interview Professor James Carter, Dean of the History Department at Saint Joseph's University. The story that the three discuss is Lu Xun's story "Medicine."
Professor Carter's most recent book is Champions Day, a book about the last gasp of old Shanghai.
Today's podcast is an interview with Professor Carolyn Brown, author of Reading Lu Xun through Carl Jung. We had a great conversation with her about Lu Xun's story "Soap." This story, in Lu Xun's collection titled 彷徨 (not the more well-known collection 吶喊), is too often ignored. Professor Brown shows that this story touches on issues of gender, class and modernity in a way that deserves more attention.
This week's podcast is on one of the most important stories in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun's True Story of Ah Q (鲁迅 - 阿Q正传). Rob and Lee attempt to tackle the story that changed China and still echos down to the present.
Here we are at what is arguably Lu Xun's most important text. Rob and Lee discuss this text in terms of content, language and modernity.
In Episode 3 in our Lu Xun Series, we interview one of the experts in the field of Lu Xun studies (and advisor to both Rob and Lee) about the Preface to Lu Xun's most important collection of short stories War Cry (Nahan). This preface has been the subject of numerous debates in China and in literary circles outside of China. We tried to break down some of the most important parts of that debate in our discussion.
Today, we have our second installment in the Lu Xun series. This week we are joined by Professor Theodore Huters, Professor Emeriti in UCLA's Asian Languages and Cultures Department and Chief Editor, Renditions, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of several books, including Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China and Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity, soon to be released by Cambria Press. Professor Huters was generous enough to give his time to talk about one of Lu Xun's less-well known early works: "Towards a Refutation of Malevolent Voices," published originally in 1908. Professor Huters convincingly argues that though this work is not well known, it is important for understanding the arc of Lu Xun's work.
This is the first episode in our series on Lu Xun, and, for this episode, we are going to look at some of the earliest aspects of Lu Xun's career, both his time growing up in Shaoxing, his time in Japan and his attempts to become a translator.
This week, we change up the format a bit. Instead of talking about a specific text, we catch on our personal lives a bit, talking about grad school, what we learned in finishing our Ph.D.'s and a few other things. The podcast is also a bit longer than our normal format.