题目：The Genesis of High Modernism

演讲人：Leon Chai, Emeritus Professor, English & Comparative Literature University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

时间：2012-12-6 (周四) 晚19：00-20：30

地点：文南楼116会议室

主办：清华大学外文系、清华大学比较文学与文化研究中心

演讲者简介：Professor Leon Chai is Emeritus Professor, English & Comparative Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently a visiting professor at Beijing University. He earned his Ph.D. in University of Virginia, Charlottesville in l984 and has published many books and articles, among which areRomantic Theory(2006),Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy(1998),Aestheticism: The Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature(1990),The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance(1990), "Prospects for Idealism" (2006), "Romantic Answers, Victorian Questions: Cultural Possibilities for Melville at Midcentury"(2005), “Edith Wharton” (1997), "The Inevitable Fall: Reflections on the Visionary Cycle"(1995), "Melville and Shelley: Speculations on Metaphysics, Morals, and Poetics inPierreand ‘Shelley's Vision’" (l983), "Remarks on the Development of Theoretical Structure in Nineteenth-Century Thought" (l982).

Abstract: Modernism was (as Matthew Arnold says) "caught between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." My talk is about the struggle to create the High Modernist poem, and how Eliot finally made that process itself the subject of his landmark work.