全球文明与传播博士系列讲座之二

主讲人：万明（中国社会科学院中国历史研究院古代史所研究员）
对话人：马丽蓉（上海外国语大学丝路战略研究所教授）

主讲人简介：
万明，中国社会科学院中国历史研究院古代史所研究员，中国中外关系史学会会长、中国郑和研究会副会长，中国明史学会首席顾问，国际郑和学会顾问。长期从事明史和中外关系史研究，主要著作有《中国融入世界的步履：明与清前期海外政策比较研究》、《中葡早期关系史》、《明代中外关系史论稿》、《明本<瀛涯胜览>校注》,发表《明代中葡两国的第一次正式交往》、《明代白银货币化：中国与世界连接的新视角》等论文百篇以上。

It has become increasingly popular to describe all forms of presentation as “story telling”. Scholarly publications are not an exception. However, it has remained a challenge to tell scholarly stories to the academic community, especially the international community. Writing and other linguistic/artistic skills aside, there are three key ingredients in scholarly stories – theory, data, and analysis – in scholarly publications. In the talk, I’ll share my observations on what, why, and how the ingredients play their roles, respectively and jointly, in telling scholarly stories in the age of big data, artificial intelligence and computational methods.

The overall aim of World Literature is to study literature in a larger context than the linguistic and cultural context where local literatures originate, but also to always take the local conditions and particularities into account. This endeavor requires an enhanced sensitivity to two features. First, we have to be aware of the possibility of any local environment, no matter its size, to foster literature that can be labelled world literature. At this point, I will focus on the tiny town of Weimar in Germany where Goethe revived the notion of world literature. Second, we have to focus on cross-cultural issues beyond literature itself with regard to theory and methodology, which implies the formation of an interdisciplinary research agenda involving broader fields of disciplines than has often been the case in the literary studies. I will list a few hot topics of that nature. The lecture will exemplify this double awareness and the ensuing agenda for future literary studies.

Most continents are rich in post-imperial situations, within written history for many centuries and even longer. In the 20th century, the post-imperial conditions have a global outreach, because the dwindling empires of this century were born during the European colonial expansion after Columbus. The European, and Western, notion of progress and human power to shape history at will make the disappearance of an empire a fall, due to human errors, not a regular detour towards reemergence. The fall or fading away of an empire is not just an event with a precise date, but a process which, inevitably, shows cracks before it actually happens and entangles the pre-imperial and the post-imperial conditions in each other. How to imagine the change, important for our present historical situation, as cultural issue involving cultural identities is the topic of my lecture. My lecture will concentrate on two such imaginative post-imperial prefigurations before the fall actually occurs and recognized by its citizens. One such prefiguration is seen through the eyes of the colonizers, J.M. Foster’s A Passage to India (1927), the other is seen through the eyes of the colonized, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1957).