About the Event
This talk focuses on the self-translation of Zhang Ailing 張愛玲 (Eileen Chang, 1920–1995), one of the most important Chinese writers of the twentieth century. Although self-translation is overlooked in most studies of her work, Chang’s literary achievements are attributed in part to her lifelong self-translation of her lived experiences and family sagas, as well as her bilingualism. This talk will enrich current studies of self-translation by proposing a new hypothesis of theorizing self-translation as a performative act, characterized by its in-betweenness and the aesthetic freedom that the self-translator enjoys, contextualized within larger debates about translation and the specific practice of self-translation in Chinese history in comparison to its Western counterpart.
Date: November 14, 2025
Time: 4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Location: Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library, 8th Floor of Robarts Library, University of Toronto,130 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 1A5, Canada
Speaker Bio
Dr. Jessica Tsui-yan Li is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University. She is Past President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association. Her teaching and research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese literature and film, Chinese Canadian and American literature, and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self-Translation (Brill, 2025), the chief editor of The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019), and the guest editor of the special issues for the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée on “Engaging Communities in Comparative Literature” June 2017 44.2 and "Garnering Diversities in Comparative Literature" June 2018 45.2. Her articles have appeared in the refereed academic journals and books.
RSVP
Please email chk.library@utoronto.ca