Why sci-fi could be the secret weapon in China’s soft-power arsenal
First came Beijing’s ‘panda diplomacy’. Now there’s a fan-backed drive to host the ‘Olympics of SF’
Last November, thousands of diehard Chinese science-fiction fans thronged to
Chengdu for the first ever AsiaCon, a high-profile convention that drew in writers and
film-makers from Asia, Europe, the US and the Middle East. The mayor of the capital
of Sichuan province gave his blessing against a digitised backdrop of a blue galaxy...
Spring 2020 will undoubtedly be remembered as the strangest semester of our lifetimes—the rapid swerve from what should have been a blissful spring break with the promise of warmth and daffodils, to a tightly imposed shutdown that cut us off from each other and forced us to congregate in little boxes on Zoom. But through the fear, the crises, the strange stilling of time, and the disconnections of online teaching, we have been moved and inspired by our students who continued to show up for...
Ayten Tartici has been awarded the 2020 John Addison Porter Prize, one of the few prizes awarded by Yale university-wide, for her dissertation submitted in fall 2019 under the title Adagios of Form. Ayten Tartici won this highly prestigious prize for a work which highlights figures of slowness in modernist prose – instead of speed – as the distinctive poetic and political quality of the works she studies. Marcel Proust and Italo Svevo, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and...
Spencer Wolff (Comparative Literature, Ph.d. 2013) will be publishing his debut novel, The Fire in His Wake (McSweeney’s, 2020) edited by doctoral candidate Nyuol Matiok, also in the Comparative Literature Department. The novel recounts the dramatic journey of a Congolese refugee who ends up in Rabat, Morocco and tries to make his way to Spain (and whose life intersects with that of a young employee at the UNHCR over the course of a tragic summer). The novel touches on many of the themes of...
