About the Event
Whe
n Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award for
Best Sci-Fi Novel in 2015\, global readers showed a sweeping interest in it
s Chineseness: how did a Chinese author master a genre so underdeveloped in
his home country? Liu Cixin seems to have connected with a genuinely enthu
siastic global readership\, and Tor\, the leading sci-fi publisher\, is rus
hing to get the translation of the final volume of the Three-Body
trilogy out this year. Mo Yan may have won the Nobel Prize for Literature\,
but Liu Cixin enjoys fame and fans.
This talk argues that the Chinesene ss of the Three-Body trilogy lies in its representation of memory and history. Three-Body presents an impending destruction to human civilization by aliens\, but the crisis turns out to be rooted in historic al trauma of 20th century China: the Cultural Revolution. Yet th e trilogy’s subtitle\, rendered in English as Remembrance of Earth’s Pa st\, indicates its connection to a different\, literary genealogy: Mar cel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Liu Cixin’s characters\, in search of lost time\, turn a futuristic narrative into an intensely nost algic one. The future\, no matter how hostile or alien\, is but a continuat ion of the past—and human history a continuous gaze back.
Wu\, Meng holds an MA degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Western Ontario and is currently a fourt h-year doctoral student in Asian Studies at the University of British Colum bia.
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LOCATION:Room 120\, C.K. Choi Building GEO:49.267258;-123.257967 URL;VALUE=URI:https://sppga.ubc.ca/events/event/chinese-science-fiction-and -the-search-for-lost-time/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20160313T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR