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.
Today, we have author, translator and teacher, Professor Bryan Van Norden, on the podcast to discuss Lu Xun’s short but fascinating story of Kong Yiji (鲁迅 – 孔乙己), the book-stealing scholar who Lu Xun imagined to be the symbol of the true state of China’s elite culture. Professor Van Norden, Rob and Lee walk through […]
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.
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 excellent books, including Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing […]
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.
In this last episode in our lengthy series on Lu Xun, we look not so much at Lu Xun himself, but the Lu Xun that has been imagined in the minds of Communist Party apparatchiks. Here we try to tackle the legacy of Lu Xun and how it is has been interpreted.
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.
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 […]
Today, we are interrupting our podcast series on Lu Xun to celebrate the anniversary of Nixon’s earth-shattering visit to Beijing 50 years ago this week. In this episode, we take a look at the John Adams Opera, Nixon in China, tackling how the opera incorportates elements of Chinese Cultural Revolution opera and how some of […]