Luying Chen Presents at the American Comparative Literature Association's Annual Meeting
Photo: Phil Dembinski '08Humanities, History, and Social Sciences Associate Professor Luying Chen presented at the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual meeting at Georgetown University on March 9. There, Chen presented her paper titled, “Judeo-Christian Faith Concepts, Transcultural Chinese Subject Positions, and Kierkegaardian Ethic: the Case of Shi Tiesheng and Gene Luen Yang.” Chen’s presentation on her paper was part of a two-day seminar titled “Religion, Ethics, and the Secular in Literature: Intermediary, Intervention, or Conflict of the Faculties?" The seminar was sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association Committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature.
Chen’s paper analyzes how Shi Tiesheng, a native Chinese writer, and Gene Luen Yang, an American-born Chinese, reposition selective Judeo-Christian faith concepts in dialogue with Buddhist concepts to create an “intermediary space” for the disabled as well as the racially and culturally marginalized. Chen says her paper, “explore[s] the ethical orientation of the texts in light of Kierkegaard's idea of subjective truth and analyze[s] what kind of ‘unbounded community’ each author imagines behind the fragmentation of the male Chinese subjectivity.”