Filial Children in Love: Incest Prohibition in Eileen Chang’s “The Heart Sutra” and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
Talk Description: Drawing from her recently published book Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang (University of Michigan Press, 2023 press.umich.edu/Books/C/Cosmopolitan-Love), Sijia Yao questions the homogenizing aspect of Freud’s Oedipus complex by looking into the parent-child love in Sons and Lovers (1913) and Chang’s short story “Xin jing” 心經 (“The Heart Sutra”) (1943). She shows how the emancipation from the love between parent and child in both writers creates a liberation not only from the local, but also from the hegemonic secular discourse of science, in this case the global spread of Freud’s theory of the Oedipal complex. Both Chang and Lawrence see the incest problem as the weakening of the incest prohibition instead of the bursting forth of an Oedipal desire. To practice her proposed methodology of “third term” comparison, Yao demonstrates that the comparison between Lawrence and Chang breaks down the binary between China and the West by focusing on the way in which a common purpose of cosmopolitan love provides the conceptual tool for analyzing the relationships between different cultures, which are themselves changing.
Speaker Bio: Sijia Yao (Ph. D. Purdue University, www.soka.edu/about/faculty-staff/sijia-yao) is Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at Soka University of America and has previously taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has published articles on Sinophone literature, film, music, and culture in journals such as The Comparatist, Comparative Literature Studies, and Tamkang Review. Her book, Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang was published by the University of Michigan Press in November 2023.
Series Homepage: www.csusb.edu/modern-china-lecture-series