Abstract:
It is no secret that filiality 孝 is one of the cardinal Confucian virtues, ubiquitous in Chinese discourse and social practice for the past 3000 years. As a foundational concept of ethical behavior, it predates Confucius himself. With its consecration by Confucius and his followers, filiality became an uncontested principle that informed ideal behavior in China and East Asia in general. The vaunted status of filiality became the subject of radical critique in the modern era, especially by the May Fourth intellectuals and those in its wake. However, filiality has never fully retreated from the stage of Chinese social practice, ethical behavior, or the representation of human interaction in Chinese literature and cinema. In the recent post-Mao era, several authors, including Mo Yan, turned their attention to what they perceived as the core elements of Chinese culture in a movement known as “Seeking Roots” or Xungen 尋根. One of the iconic works of this inward turn was Mo Yan’s now classic novel Red Sorghum Family 紅高粱家族. Told in the first person by the self-described “unfilial” grandson of two heroes of the War of Resistance, this novel is replete with depictions of kinship and other community relations that fall within the “field” of filiality: a term adopted from Pierre Bourdieu that refers to the spectrum of actions that may occur within a society’s acceptable, but largely taken-for-granted, set of dispositions or, to use Bourdieu’s term, habitus. This lecture examines the narrative of Mo Yan’s “family” novel with particular consideration for how filiality underwrites the panoply of activities that occur in the novel, suggesting that, despite profound changes in the status of filiality through the decades of the modern era, it nevertheless persists as a key touchstone for socially acceptable, or at least expected, conduct in Chinese society.

Speaker: 
Christopher Lupke (Ph. D. Cornell University) is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. A scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and cinema, his books include The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion and a translation of Ye Shitao’s monumental work, A History of Taiwan Literature which one the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the translation of a scholarly book from the Modern Language Association. Lupke’s current research project is a book-length study of the Confucian notion of “filiality” in contemporary Chinese and Sinophone fiction.

Date: 30 May 2023 (Tuesday)

Time: 4:30 p.m.－ 6:00 p.m. (4:00 p.m. tea reception)

Venue: Activities Room, 2/F, Art Museum East Wing, CUHK

Language: English.

Event details: Sharing and Q&A

Registration: Click here

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