Ying Xiong
Ph.D.
Department of Comparative Literature
University of OregonWelcome. I'm Ying.
If you're on the narrow road to karumi, wishing for a "terrace deep as the sky"—bowered and at the bustle's edge—to rest your sore eyes, you've come to the right place. Please feel free to check back with me for interaction and intellectual stimulus after your visit. I thank you for your interest.About
A Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon, I take a keen interest in deepening our understanding of the intersection of theories of poetry, gender and media studies, affect theory and the cultural dynamics of translation and representation. I have pursued these interests to date by completing my dissertation, as well as numerous related projects.
As a comparatist and scholar of translation and transmediation, I track multiple disciplinary trajectories in my dissertation, Herbs and Beauty: Gendered Poethood and Translated Affect in Late Imperial and Modern China. My work analyzes the juncture at which Chinese poetry became "modern," with the early twentieth-century translation into Chinese of the British Romantics as the catalyst. At the heart of my study is the concept I call "translated affect." Through translation from the European Romantic tradition, a negative passion (antipathy) surrounding classical gender designations was made productive for modern Chinese poetry and provided it with its core critical issue. Within the classical Chinese poetic tradition, "beauty" was defined ambiguously as either male or female, with "beauty" referring to the inner (spiritual) virtues that made a poet a poet, regardless of the poet's sex. Modernism, ensconced as it was within the industrial-commercial world of the twentieth century, transformed beauty into sheer appearance and anchored it firmly within the female gender. My dissertation turns on the myth of "herbs and beauty," which dramatizes the poet's struggle for moral autonomy—a struggle that was considered to be of national as well as personal importance—with the allegorical tale of a troubled romance between a beautiful woman, adorned in fragrant herbs, and her lover. The defining femininity of the Chinese poet (man or woman) came to be displaced onto the Western woman as British Romantic ideas were gradually assimilated into the traditional myth. With the transformation of these ideas as a backdrop, I propose to show how the evolving myth worked to sustain and give form to ambivalences surrounding gender roles, material culture and social revolution — ambivalences that helped define the Chinese struggle with modernity. I contend that while Qu Yuan, losing his bearing in the vile world of rationality, sought shelter among the images of herbs and beauty in the unaffected ritual world of Chuci, his modern descendents would likewise turn to the figurative power of archetypal culture, with new meanings acquired as time goes by, for fantasy and reality to meet.
At the University of Oregon I have extensive experience teaching a wide array of courses, some of my own design. The following titles fall within this latter category: “Translating the Flesh, Politicizing the Female Body” and “Screening New Women.” I have also developed an upper-division literature course titled “Gendering Plants: Experiencing Time and Sensation in World Literature” (a course I would be teaching now had I not received the University Dissertation Fellowship, which allows me to pursue my research full-time). I have also served as a teaching assistant in the department’s introductory sequence, and I have taught Mandarin Chinese. I feel well prepared to offer classes on world literatures, critical theory, transnational or transatlantic Romanticism, as well as topics pertaining to Chinese language curriculum and media studies.
My article “The Extension of Poetic Mind” was published in UCLA’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. I also presented the paper “Burnt Pepper Plants, Broken Cassia and Grown-Old Beauty” at the 2018 Modern Language Association annual convention.
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© 2017