Cambridge, USA

Literature and Politics in Contemporary China

Lecture by Ma Jian (Author of Red Dust and The Noodle Maker) at Harvard Univeristy, October 6, 2005

Cambridge, USA

Form as Poetics: The Transition from Late Qing to Modern Poetry

Lecture by Michelle Yeh (University of California-Davis) at Harvard University, October 31, 2005

New York, USA

Second International Symposium on Research and Pedagogy in Classical Chinese and Chinese Language History Columbia University

Sponsored by CCK Foundation and NOCFL, the Second International Symposium on Research and Pedagogy in Classical Chinese and Chinese Language History was held at Columbia University in New York City on October 21-22, 2005. More than 20 scholars and educators representing Europe, East Asia and North America, presented their latest findings on a wide range of subjects.

The themes of six panels were Poetic Chinese, Lexical Studies of Pre-Qin Texts, Lexical Studies of Early Modern Chinese, the Syntactic Evolution of Chinese Language, Phonology and Morphology, and Linguistic Research and Chinese Language Teaching. The presentations and discussions that followed each panel shed new light on a number of persistent issues in Chinese language history, such as the reconstruction of the obstruent coda in Archaic Chinese, the semantic nature of Ba-construction, word order change in Chinese language history and the sources of general disposal structures. Some previously less-noticed issues were raised as well, including the contrastive study of Chinese sentence-final aspect marking and the verb-attached aspect marking in English, and prosodic restraints on syntactic structures in Chinese poetry.

Due to the relatively small size of the symposium, each presenter had ample time to argue their cases, and the discussions following each panel were thorough and constructive. All participants enjoyed the more intimate and focused environment. They hope academic exchanges as such will be continued and expanded, and expressed their appreciation for the generous support from the CCK Foundation.

The first international symposium on research and pedagogy in Classical Chinese and Chinese language history was also sponsored by the CCK Foundation and organized by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 2003.

New York, USA

The International Symposium on "the Hsia Brothers and Chinese Literature" October 28th-29th, 2005  Columbia University

Sponsored by the CCK foundation, the Symposium on "the Hsia Brothers and Chinese literature" was convened at Columbia University on October 28th and 29th 2005. As an occasion for scholars in the field of Chinese literature to pay respect to the Hsia brothers and to provide new insights to the field, the symposium attracted more than seventy scholars from different parts of the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. The presence of Professors C. T. Hsia (Columbia University), Patrick Hanan and David Wang (Harvard University), Kang-I Sun Chang (Yale University), Jonathan Chaves (George Washington University), Chen Guoqiu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Chen Pingyuan (Peking University), Edward Gunn (Cornell University), Perry Link (Princeton University), Mei Chia-ling (National Taiwan University), Michelle Yeh (UC-Davis), and many others made this symposium an intellectually stimulating and memorable event.

After remarks from Professors Robert Hymes (Columbia University) and David Wang, the symposium began with a roundtable discussion on "Chinese Literary Studies from a Historical Perspective." The roundtable discussion was then followed by a panel on "The Hsia Brothers and Chinese Studies." During the formal dinner reception at the Faculty House at Columbia University, Professor C. T. Hsia??s various impromptu interactions with the participants certainly left the audience with an imprinting and heartwarming impression.

The second day of the symposium featured mostly junior scholars in the field of Chinese literature. With topics ranging from the "Acoustic Aesthetics of Vernacular fiction", to various reexaminations of the paradigmatic trope of the "Gate of Darkness," and from "the Women Writers C. T. Hsia Did Not Write About" to "Sinophone Literature and Its Challenges to Modern Chinese Literature," scholars such as Paize Keulemans (Yale University), Michael Berry (UC-Santa Barbara), Amy Dooling (Connecticut College), Jing Tsu (Rutgers University), and so forth demonstrated both the permeating influences from the Hsia Brothers and new scholarly attempts to build on and expend the existing paradigms set by the Hsia Brothers. This symposium successfully lived up to its title and proved itself as more than a celebratory event.

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