Weee, I’m currently visting the UK to talk about Literary Sensory Studies – stop by if you’re in the neighbourhood:

Wednesday 19 February 2020: 1-2pm
The Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, Baines Wing 2.06

Tuesday 25 February 2020: 5-6.30pm
Universty of Oxford China Centre, Wadham college

Seven Senses of the City:
Sensory Literary Studies
and the Aftertaste of Memory

In my research, I employ a framework of sensory literary studies to explore the connections between memory and materiality in contemporary Sinophone fiction from Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

I engage with themes of scented nostalgia, flavours in fiction, walking as method, literary cartography, the melody of language, gendered cityscapes, metafictional dreams and rhythmic senses of time to study how contemporary cities change the way we think about time, space and memory.

In this talk, I will introduce my ideas for sensory literary scholarship and present a few textual examples of what such a sensorially focused, thematical comparisons might bring to light. In particular, I will examine how memories taste and at how various (un)healthy appetites regulate recollection as a technology of the self in Dorothy Tse and Hon Lai Chu’s novel A Dictionary of Two Cities (雙城辭典) from 2012, in Ding, Liying’s novel The Woman in the Clock (时钟里的女人) from 2001 and in Chu, Tien-hsin’s novella The Old Capital (古都) from 1996.