Title: Mimesis, Ars Poetica and the Rise of Semiotics of Art: Re-reading Three Excerpts of Classical Texts, Plato’s The Sophist, Aristotle’s Poetics, and Horace’s Ars Poetica
Lecturer: Han-liang Chang (University Special Chair Professor of Comparative Poetics at Fudan University and Professor Emeritus at National Taiwan University)
Chairperson: FAN Jing (Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University)
Date: 2 pm, October 29th, 2014 (Wednesday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
The speaker examines the classical concepts of mimesis, apologia poetica and ars poetica and enquires how they give rise to a general semiotics of art by re-reading closely the excerpts from three well-known texts: Plato’s The Sophist, Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Epistula Ad Pisones(Ars Poetica).
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Han-liang Chang, born on 30th April 1945, is University Special Chair Professor of Comparative Poetics at Fudan University and Professor Emeritus at National Taiwan University. He holds a Doctorate (Doctorat d’état) in Comparative Literature at National Taiwan University, a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in English Literature at the Johns Hopkins University, and twice Fulbright Fellowship in USA. Professor Chang has taught and researched at Marquette University and University of Washington, Seattle, USA, University of Manchester and Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK, Charles University, Czech Republic, and University of Athens, Hellenic Republic. He has been on the Examination and Assessment Boards of University of Leeds, UK, University of Oklahoma and University of California, San Diego, the Guggenheim Foundation, USA, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Baptist University of Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong Institute of Education. He is the Founding Member of the Literary Theory Committee, International Comparative Literature Association (1985-1992), Honorary Life Member of the Prague Linguistic Circle (elected 1996), Fellow of the Linnean Society of London (elected 2005), among other honours and distinctions. Professor Chang has published a dozen of books and more than 200 articles, his most recently publication in English being Sign and Discourse: Dimensions of Comparative Poetics (Fudan University Press, 2013).