ABOUT THIS PROJECT
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This project examines the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of how faculty in universities in Hong Kong and in Chicago can use Early Modern literature to encourage students to consider topics such as aging, anti-aging or rejuvenation, and the environment in a cross-cultural dimension. Through our many virtual meetings and through our proposed in-person future meeting, we are interested in studying how our current epistemologies, when dealing with these three topics, can be affected by the intercultural understanding and communication of values from a comparative perspective.
By bringing together a discrete number of college professors from Chicago and the city of Hong Kong in China, our goal is to keep learning about the current styles, practices, and logics of our research and teaching about the process of growing old, the cosmetics, techniques, and rites employed for rejuvenation, and the role that our cultural, emotional and geographical surroundings play in it. To accomplish this, we are focusing on our field of specialization, early modern literature. We are discussing to what extent our current multidisciplinary approach is able to encourage not only future research but also find new ways to teach these topics in a more critical manner, and how new technologies can assist us in this process.
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RELATIONSHIP TO SCHOLARSHIP
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Lead by Frederick de Armas, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and supported by Carmela Mattza (Visiting scholar at the University of Chicago and associate professor of Spanish at Louisiana State University), and Larry Norman (Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago), the project would engage with faculty in Hong Kong who research and teach the same specialization. We are in the process of exchanging ideas regarding sixteenth and seventeenth-century literatures from Western Europe and China in order to find ways to shed new light on the cultures and arts of the period. In other words, we would look at how writers such as, for example, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Michael Montaigne, Xu Xiake, Zhang Dai and Tang Xianzú represent the elder and the process of aging in relation to the natural and urban environments. In order to better understand their works and cultures, we would turn to emerging fields, such as ecocriticism, environmental studies, [genetics criticism? (text)], global south studies, new materialism, semiotics, and futurities. This last one is of special interest for this research group since, for example, futurities take into account artistic, scientific, and philosophical notions or aspirations as they seek to affect later times. As such, futurities can take the form of an imaginary utopia, an invention that will shape later discoveries or affect how they are applied. They can also take the form of groundbreaking artistic endeavors that find fulfillment in later times, an idea meant to move forward, or they can be literary genres and devices that will impact the future. How do these futurities change if viewed from different locations (Hong Kong and Chicago)? Will these different visions allow us to come up with a more comprehensive view of the topics at hand (aging, rejuvenation, and the environment)? In this way, we expect to learn from the past to improve the present through a comparative vision of different civilizations.