Through an original framework of literary sensory studies, Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction (Cambria, 2022) provides a comparative analysis of how six contemporary works of Sinophone fiction reimagine the links between the self and the city, the past and the present, as well as the physical and the imaginary. It explores the connection between elusive memories and material cityscapes through the matrix of the senses. Joining recent efforts to imagine world literature beyond the international, this monograph engages in a triangular comparison of fiction from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei – three Sinophone cities, each with its own strong urban identity that comes with unique cultural and linguistic hybridities.
Sensing the Sinophone combines narratological tools for studying time in fiction with critical concepts of spatiality in order to establish an analytical focus on narrative voice and reliability (including the inaccuracy of memory), structural non-linearity (such as mental time travel), and the construction of fictional parallel cities as loci for plot development. In this study, the conventional sensorium and its role in recollection is explored and amplified to include whole-body sensations, habitual synesthesia, and the emotional aspects of sensations that produce a sense of place or self.
Astrid Møller-Olsen is an international research fellow with Lund University (Sweden), University of Stavanger (Norway), and University of Oxford (United Kingdom); her position is funded by the Swedish Research Council. Dr. Møller-Olsen holds an MA in comparative literature and a PhD in Chinese studies. Her research has been published in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, SFRA Review, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, and International Journal of Heritage Studies. She hosts the podcast Sinophone Unrealities and the literary blog xiaoshuo.blog.
Tong He is a Lecturer in English at Central China Normal University.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH)
Amrita Ghosh, "Kashmir's Necropolis: Literary, Cultural, and Visual Texts" (Lexington Books, 2023)
Benjamin Balint, "Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy" (Norton, 2019)
Thersa Matsuura, "The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth" (Adams Media, 2024)
Robert Cochran, "Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis" (U Arkansas Press, 2024)
Polo B. Moji, "Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives" (Routledge, 2022)
Sohini Pillai, "Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Rebecca Copeland, "Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
Aakriti Mandhwani, "Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
Gina Chung, "Green Frog: Stories" (Vintage, 2024)
Eileen M. Hunt, "The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Edwin McRae, "Narrative Worldbuilding: A Player Centric Approach to Designing Story Rich Game Worlds" (Narrative, 2024)
Chris Haufe, "Do the Humanities Create Knowledge?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Jan Baetens, "Rebuilding Story Worlds: The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
Adi Mahalel, "The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism" (SUNY Press, 2023)
Jesse McCarthy, "The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song
Nicholas Taylor-Collins, "Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature" (Manchester UP, 2022)
Benjamin Brose, "Embodying Xuanzang: The Postmortem Travels of a Buddhist Pilgrim" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
Laura Helton, "Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
Gulliver’s Travels
Anne of Avonlea
New Books in Anthropology
New Books in African American Studies