7 月 15 日 17:00 中国比较文学云讲堂·第四季 (2023) 第四讲预告

主讲人：Prof. Lucia Boldrini (University of London)  

主持人：张  靖  副研究员（中国人民大学）

主   题：People as Characters

时   间：2023 年 7 月 15 日（周六）17:00-19:00（北京时间） 

方   式：腾讯会议+ B 站直播

主讲人简介 

       Lucia Boldrini，欧洲科学院院士，现任国际比较文学学会主席。伦敦大学英语/比较文学教授，兼比较文学中心主任。研究兴趣包括虚构传记和自传，乔伊斯、但丁和现代主义中世纪主义，比较文学，以及有关地中海地区的文献。著作包括：《他者自传：历史主题和文学小说》《乔伊斯、但丁和文学关系诗学》；与 Julia Novak 联合编辑《生活写作实验：自传/传记与小说的交叉点》；与Michael Lackey和Monica Latham共同担任Bloomsbury “Biofiction” 系列丛书的主编。

      Lucia Boldrini is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests include fictional biography and autobiography; Joyce, Dante and modernist medievalism; comparative literature; and literature on and from the Mediterranean area, fields in which she has published widely. Among her books: Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (Routledge, 2012); Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations (CUP, 2001); and as editor, Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction, with Julia Novak (Palgrave, 2017). She is Editor-in-Chief, with Michael Lackey and Monica Latham, of the Bloomsbury “Biofiction” book series. She is an elected member of the Academia Europaea, and currently serves as President of the International Comparative Literature Association.

主持人简介

        张靖，中国人民大学文学博士，中国人民大学国际文化交流学院副研究员，汉语国际推广研究所副所长，兼任中国比较文学学会副秘书长及国际比较文学学会“经文辩读与比较文学研究会”秘书长。主要研究领域：圣经文学、女性主义、汉学与比较文学。代表作：《新约文本中的“墨提斯”智慧母题与意义建构——以〈马可福音〉7:24-30为例》《〈箴言〉1-9章中的“外女”形象剖析》《撒玛利亚妇人与后现代圣经诠释》、“Métis and New Testament: Wisdom for Chinese women from Mark”。

内容简介

        Character as a key feature of narrative has been the object of narratological, psychoanalytic, cognitive, structuralist, poststructuralist approaches, and more. A significant dividing line is between those studies which invite us to treat character in fiction as analogous to a human being, and those which (arising, at least in Britain and the Anglophone world, from Practical Criticism and then developed by Structuralism and Poststructuralism) decry the humanism of the former and emphasize that character is a linguistic construct that should not be treated as a person: doing so is not just hopelessly naive, but it also exposes us to the manipulative techniques that seek to control our subjectivity through identification. Correspondingly, readers are seen as divided between those that identify with characters or judge them on the basis of their value-systems, as they would with people existing in our own world; and the critically savvy readers who know to privilege the objectivization of the textual construct, requiring not empathy, sympathy, or – worst of all – identification, but the distance of interpretation. Recent critical interventions on the question of literary character have sought to go beyond such opposition, Rita Felski in particular rehabilitating the notion of identification while accepting that readers also remain aware of the constructedness of character.

        These discussions are about fiction, and therefore tend to skirt the question of the subject of biography and autobiography – that is, the textual construction of a person who did (or does) live in the real world and whose documented life is being narrated. But what happens when the text is a fiction  about a real person, and the narrative belongs to the genre of biofiction or that of autofiction (or, I would add, to that of heterobiography, when writing is in the first person but the writer is different from the narrator/ character within the text, drawing attention, in multiple ways, to the duality of the I)? Here, the confusion between the linguistic construct and the person who really lived (/lives) in the world is programmatic and central to the aesthetics – as well as the ethics – of the genre; the character is both fictional and historical; the manipulations of fiction can't fully displace the historicity of the individual and of the narrative, and, conversely, the historicity can't escape the fictionality of the narrative project. 

        My talk will reflect on these questions and consider how character is constructed in biographical and autobiographical fictions, and how this reflection on character may help us understand this feature not only in the way it functions within narrative, but also, perhaps, in how it affects our understanding of the people we encounter in the world.

      人物作为叙事的一个关键特征一直是叙事学、精神分析、认知、结构主义、后结构主义等方法的研究对象。相关研究分为两类，一类要求我们将小说中的人物视为与人相似的；其他（至少在英国和英语世界中产生于实践批评，然后由结构主义和后结构主义发展起来的）谴责小说人物的人文主义特性，强调人物是一种语言结构，不应该被视为一个人：这样做不仅是无可救药的天真，而且还让我们暴露在试图通过认同来控制我们的主观性的操纵技术之下。相应地，读者被视为分为两类：一类是认同人物角色，二是根据他们的价值体系来判断他们，就像他们对我们世界中存在的人所做的那样；精明的批判性读者知道优先考虑文本结构的客观化，不需要移情、同情，或者——最糟糕的是——认同，而是阐释的距离。最近对文学人物问题的批判性干预试图超越这种对立，尤其是丽塔·费尔斯基（Rita Felski）恢复了认同的概念，同时承认读者也仍然意识到人物的建构性。  

      这些讨论是关于小说的，因此倾向于回避传记和自传主题的问题，即一个曾经（或确实）生活在现实世界中的人的文本结构，并且其记录的是正在被叙述的生活。但是，当文本是关于人的小说，并且叙述属于传记小说或自传小说的类型（或者，我想补充一下，异传的类型，当写作是第一人称但作者是与文本中的叙述者/角色不同，以多种方式引起人们对“我”的二元性的注意？），在这里，语言结构和真正生活在世界上的人之间的混淆是程序性的，也是该流派的美学和伦理的核心；该角色既是虚构的又是历史的；虚构的操纵不能完全取代个人和叙事的历史性，相反，历史性也无法逃脱叙事的虚构性。 

      本场讲座将反思这些问题，并考虑人物是如何在传记和自传小说中构建的，以及对人物的这种反思如何帮助我们理解这一特征，不仅在于它在叙事中的运作方式，而且也许还在于它如何影响我们对世界上遇到的人的理解。

参与方式

本场讲座采用腾讯会议+B站直播的形式进行。

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云讲堂第三季讲座将采用同一网址进行直播，请大家关注 UP 主获取每期开讲提醒。

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