Panel: Memoirs of Home, Homeland, and the Crossing of Cultures
Copanelists: Timothy Dow Adams and Mary Besemeres
Despite their striking differences in character, academic interests, and professional pursuits, Hu Shi (1891–1962) and Wu Mi (1894–1978) did have something in common. They both stayed in the U.S.A and studied in the Ivy League in their twenties. They were keen observers of American society, and tireless comparatists of American culture and Chinese culture. More important, they were lifelong diarists whose diaries about their lives in the U.S.A were crucial both for the formation of their personalities and for the promotion of their careers. This paper will investigate the two diarists’ function as both autobiographers and biographers to reveal the absence of certain American lives in one diarist and the presence of such lives in another, and thus to show the Chinese autobiographers’ vision of the self. Generic hybridity, such as the inclusion of poems, notes, letters, travelogues, treaties, newspaper clippings, book and article digests, even caricatures, pictures, and riddles in the diaries, will be examined to illustrate the impact of a temporary cross-cultural identity—Chinese “Liuxuesheng” in the USA—upon the method of diary writing. The reasons for the shift from diary writing to note taking in Hu Shi, and Wu Mi’s adherence to a somewhat strictly private diary despite the diarist’s intention to let his diary serve as “a big and miscellaneous note-book,” will be explored to explain the juxtaposition effect of diary writing. This effect also exists in the double function of a diarist as both autobiographer and biographer, and especially in the generic hybridity of journal keeping.
Tuesday, June 24 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Cross Cultures, Cross Purposes?
Copanelists: Noelani Arista, Margaretta Jolly, and Sidonie Smith
Zhao Baisheng is Professor of Comparative World Literature and Head of the Institute of World Literature at Peking University. Currently, he serves as Director of the World Auto/Biography Center at Peking University, and Editor of the official website of IABA (www.iaba.org.cn). His publications include Head of States: A Biography (1995), Portraits (2000), A Theory of Auto/Biography (2003), and Essays in European and American Literature: Auto/Biography Studies (2005).