UNSW Chinese Studies Seminar Series
Jonathan Stalling
3pm-5pm Thursday 19 November
209 Morven Brown Bldg., High St., Gate 8, UNSW
In this seminar Dr Jonathan Stalling, Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, will present on the history of English as a medium for Classical Chinese verse from the work of Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound to more recent translators and poets. From this historical context, Stalling will shift to the English Jueju form (quatrain) he created and taught at UC Berkley in the mid 1990’s and has gone on to teach for the last 20 years culminating in the Newman Young Writers Award which is given out to the best English jueju of several hundred submitted each year from Primary students to Adult learners. Drawing upon the monosyllabic roots of the English language, Stalling has created a system of composing Jueju (and other classical verse forms) in English that follow all of the rules of classical Chinese versification (meter, parallelism, rime, thematic progression, etc) granting teachers tools to teach classical Chinese poetics through hands on exercises and social gaming practices. To see last year’s winners and a teaching video go to http://www.ou.edu/uschina/newman/youngwriters.2015.html and http://www.ou.edu/uschina/newman/youngwriters.html. The possible value of such experiments will be discussed as they relate to pedagogy and poetics.
Jonathan Stalling is an Associate Professor of English specializing in cross-cultural poetics, comparative literature, and translation studies at the University of Oklahoma, where he is the founding editor of Chinese Literature Today magazine and book series and the curator of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive at the University of Oklahoma Library. He is the 2015 Poet in Residence at Beijing University (first westerner to hold this positon). His books include Poetics of Emptiness (Fordham) (recently published in Chinese as 虚无诗学), Grotto Heaven (Chax Press), Yingelishi (吟歌丽诗) (Counterpath), and Lost Wax: Translation through the Void (TinFish). He is also an editor of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: a Critical Edition (Fordham) and the translator of Winter Sun: The Poetry of Shi Zhi (1966-2007) (University of Oklahoma Press).
Convenor: A/Prof. Jon Eugene von Kowallis Chinese Studies School of Humanities and Languages UNSW tel. 9385-1020