讲座题目：Hybrid Messiahs

主讲人：Thomas Oliver Beebee教授

主持人：庄佩娜副研究员

讲座时间：5月22日 下午14:30-16:30

讲座摘要：

The nineteenth-century American intelligentsia intensely debated the question of whether the offspring of different races were hybrids or “mongrels.”In other words, hybridity was seen as a deviation from, rather than the creative force behind, racial types. The result, in Homi Bhabha’s words, is that “these heterogeneous sites . . . must continually be re-presented in the production of terror or fear. The paranoid threat from the hybrid is finally uncontainable because it breaks down the symmetry and duality of self/other, inside/outside.” Whether fictional or real (or both), Captain Ahab, Nat Turner (US), Lous Riel (Canada), or Antônio Conselheiro (Brazil),asmessiahs of the New World are painfully aware of themselves as simultaneously Self and Other. I show in this talk how their messianic missions involve seeking a symbolic resolution to this conflict.

主讲人简介：

Thomas Oliver Beebee is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Penn State University, editor-in-chief of the journal Comparative Literature Studies, and general editor of the Bloomsbury series, Literatures as World Literature. The author of Clarissa on the Continent (1991), The Ideology Of Genre (1994), Epistolary Fiction in Europe (1999), Nation and Region in Modern European and American Fiction (2008), and Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature (2011), Professor Beebee engages in a number of research areas, including criticism and theory, epistolarity, eighteenth-century literature, translation (theory, practice, and literary mimesis), mental maps in literature, and law and literature.