台灣大學
人文社會高等研究院
中國語文學系/外國語文學系
學術演講
" 'The roar which lies on the other side of silence': Hong lou
meng, Middlemarch, and Other Masterpieces of Narrative
Fiction"
Speaker: Dr. Donald Stone
The City University of New York
Peking University
Moderator: Dr. Carol Ku(National Taiwan University)
Time:
Friday November 19, 2010, 15:30-17:00 pm
Venue:
DFLL New Conference Room (舊總圖會議室)
(a.k.a. Old Main Library Conference Room)
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 power. “That element of tragedy
which lies in the very fact of frequency,” Eliot writes in Middlemarch, “has not yet wrought itself into the
coarse 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.“
About the speaker:
Donald Stone, Professor Emeritus at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, is also visiting
professor in the English Department of Peking University. He received degrees from UC Berkeley (BA)
and Harvard (MA and PhD). He has been visiting professor at Harvard, New York University, and Capital
Normal University (Beijing). He has lectured everywhere in China and the West. In 1991 he was visiting
scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Science. Among his awards was a John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Fellowship. His many publications include Novelists in a Changing World and The Romantic
Impulse in Victorian Fiction (both published by Harvard University Press), and Communications with the
Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue (University of Michigan Press). He has recently written the chapter
on Henry James for the New Cambridge History of Literary Criticism.