Xinmin Liu
Assistant Professor
Chinese Literature
703 Old Engineering Hall
412-624-5577
Fax: 412-624-3458
xinmin@pitt.edu
Office Hours
Fall Term: By appointment only.
My research is mostly in modern Chinese literature and culture with emphasis on three areas: 1) Chinese narrative literature and its myriad forms of biography and autobiography; I investigate Chinese novels of self-development and Western Bildungsroman of the modern era to deepen our knowledge of the correlation between narrative progression, self fulfillment and social Darwinism. 2) Visual narratives of modern Chinese cinema; I study filmic representations of historicity, memory and ethnic and cultural identities in the Chinese context to explore the vast changes the visual has brought to at once enlighten and complicate human perception under the modern condition. 3) Inquiries of nostalgia, diaspora and utopia as movements in intellectual history. I engage in such trends of human thought to inspect the constructive mediation between Asian philosophies and European vitalism and existentialism, between aesthetic and political expressions at the turn of 20th Century.
Current Courses: Fall 2006
1088 New Chinese Cinema
1089 World of China: Popular Literature
Publications
“Play and Being Playful: the Quotidian in Cinematic Remembrance of the Mao Era,” in Asian Cinema
“Spectacles of Remembrance: Nostalgia in Contemporary Chinese Art” in Journal of Contemporary China
“Deciphering the Populist Gadfly: Cultural Polemics around Zhang Chengzhi's 'Religious Sublime'” in The Modern Chinese Literary Essay
“Self-Making in Wilderness: Zhang Chengzhi's Reinvention of Ethnic Identity” in American Journal of Chinese Studies
“The Education of Desire: Space, Sight and Self-Cultivation in Jin Ping Mei” in Tamkang Review
My book manuscript The Self in Dialogue is near completion. It explores a key aspect of Chinese modernity--the education and development of an individual self in relation to teleological and historical consciousness as reflected in modern Chinese fiction and films. The chapters, dealing with individual authors or literary/cultural trends, delineate the trajectory of an emerging interplay between the self and the community against the social and cultural terrains of China’s modern in its different phases. My focus will be on how the growth of the self has been persistently projected, formed or thwarted by way of an “other,” i.e. one imagined by virtue of Western enlightenment and Neo-Confucianism, negotiated through key notions of Buddhism, social Darwinism, vitalism, cultural and ethnic revivalism, and personal remembrance of the historical past.
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Education:
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale University, 1997, Dissertation: The Self in Progress: Narrative Strategies of Self-Identity in Early Modern Chinese Fiction, 1997
MA in English, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY. Thesis: Melville and His Voyage of Consciousness, 1984
MA in English language and society, Beijing Foreign Studies University, 1980
BA in English and American Literature, Beijing Foreign Studies University, 1975
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