“Heady Flights and Costly Slips:  The Fantasy and the Reality of Garden Swings in Classic Chinese Fiction”

Andrew Plaks, Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Princeton University
Knight Library Browsing Room
2:00 pm

In this talk, Professor Plaks will consider the image of the garden swing as an element of landscape appearing in a variety of works of traditional Chinese literature. Reviewing a number of examples from classical poetry and “classic” fiction, he will discuss the aestheticization of swings as a feature of elegant literati culture, and the moralization of swinging as a figure of precarious boundary-crossing. He will conclude with a piece by the celebrated contemporary author MoYan that seems to pointedly work the image from both ends of this spectrum of significance.

This event is presented by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and is cosponsored by the UO Confucius Institute for Global China Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, and the Asian Studies Program.  For more info, please call 541-346-1521.