Public Lecture by Centre of Cross-Cultural Studies


-------[ Lecture Details ] [ Speaker Details ] [ Book Donation Ceremony & Book Exhibition ]-------


[Lecture Details]
Speaker:	Donald D. Stone
	Professor of English, Graduate Centre, City University of New York
.
Organizer:	Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies
Co-organizer:	Run Run Shaw Library
.
Date:	January 14, 2004
Time:	4:30 p.m.
Venue:	Library Seminar Room 2, Run Run Shaw Library, CityU
.
Synopsis:	According to C. T. Hsia, "For social realism and psychological insight, Dream of the Red Chamber is a work to be placed alongside the greatest novels in the Western tradition." But can one really profitably compare the finest of Chinese novelists with Thackeray or Tolstoy or Proust? Perhaps it would be more useful to attempt the reverse: to ask if even the supreme masterpiece of English fiction, George Eliot's Middlemarch, is worthy of being placed alongside Hong lou meng.?Without ever having heard of Cao Xueqin, Eliot attempted a novel that, like Cao's, would draw on poetry,? philosophy, psychology, and history. Like Hong lou meng among Chinese fictions, Middlemarch would be unlike anything before or after it in English literature?one of the few novels written for adults, as Virginia Woolf noted): a book at once rebuking the "silly novels" of the past, and a work of genuine tragic power.?"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency," Eliot writes in Middlemarch, "has not yet wrought itself into the course emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."


Language:	English

.
[Speaker Details]
*Donald D. Stone* received his Ph. D. from Harvard University. He is the author of Novelists in a Changing World (1972) and The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction (1980), both published by Harvard University Press, and more recently, Communications with the Future: Mathew Arnold in Dialogue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
.

[Book Donation Ceremony & Book Exhibition]

The lecture will be accompanied by a book donation ceremony acknowledging Professor Stone's donation of western art books to the Library. The ceremony will be held at the Library Lobby on 14 January 2004 (4:15 p.m.). An exhibition of the books donated by Prof Stone will be held from 2 January - 1 February 2004.