YouSaid · the spoken record

Rebecca F. Kuang

lines on the record: 65
first: 2024-01-24
most recent: 2024-01-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'd like to go somewhere where they speak Chinese because I don't spend enough time living in Chinese and when I was in Taipei this past summer and living in it for most hours during the day I felt that pathways were being unlocked in my brain and my ability to read and interpret texts was improving by huge margins, but I've already lived in Taipei so I can't say that I might just go on a backpacking trip for six months across all of the cities and villages in Taiwan that I haven't been to and I've only been to Taipei. I haven't been to China in our Gaussam or any of the other major regions so it's a bit of a cheaty answer but these are very new places for me so that's what I would want to do and also something that is a realistic journey for me in the near future.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am fascinated by the Cold War psyche, and this might be because we're reading watchmen right now, which is a comic book that I slept on for many years, and I hadn't realized what a Cold War work of fiction it was, but I was born in 96, right? I know from that period is mediated through film and from novels, and it's just such an extraordinary mindset to think that any moment now the whole world might go extinct to be told at school that if you duck under your desk, you might survive a nuclear blast. And I would really like to just walk around and talk to people to understand how people felt and how people were living.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is not a worry for me because I never intend to settle in one place. I like the sense of adventure too much. And even if I'm based for nine months of the year at some academic institution that still leaves the summer to explore and learn and think in new languages, I very much make it a priority to have the flexibility to pick up everything and move to a different city at any stage in my life. And this is what I've structured a lot of my life around having that ability to learn and become a new person and shed my skin every few years. So this is not a worry to me because it is”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I recently read Digital Minimalism because I was fed up with social media, I found it very compelling, and then I read deep work too, and I know lots of people have strong feelings good or bad about all those books. I think I'm the kind of person who that advice is very helpful for the kind of extremist approach to deep work. And this is just what I do now. I have gotten pretty strict about whose emails I answer, when I answer emails, who I make time for, and who I don't so that I'm able to spend the most productive and focused hours of my day, which is from 9 to 12 in the morning, writing fiction. And then as the hours trickle on after that, my brain becomes more and more tired. I shift to tasks that are less and less engaging until by the end of the day I'm just firing off. Yes, thank you. Sounds good in my inbox.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contract for at least three new books at the moment, so this makes scheduling very difficult and the only way I've been able to strike some kind of balances in between is to become a devotee of Cal Newport. I don't know if you've had Cal Newport on the podcast.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's something that I'm trying to figure out. Doesn't seem to be a lot of value in having published five, six novels on the job market in the fields that I would like to get hired in. So there seems to be a significant trade-off between focusing on my fiction career and doing well in my studies. I'm also at a period in my studies where it sink or swim. Either I commit now or I don't because you can kind of muddle through an undergraduate degree while having your soul focused elsewhere. And I think this is even true for masters in the first few years of a PhD program. But reading for your qualifying exams and writing a dissertation, I think involves the all-encompassing focus that I'm used to bringing to my manuscripts and they demand that I'm thinking about those problems every second of every day. At the same time, I'm on”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like rest or a default to normal, the normal state is writing. And I think I'm just built like this and it's not a productivity hack. Some people really want to write and other people have other hobbies and passions and things that are pleasurable to them.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it's a compulsion, so if I'm not writing, then I don't feel right, I feel extremely unsatisfied. I am the kind of person who's really bad at being on holiday, and if I go on holiday, then it must be a productive holiday, the kind where I am up and walking and roaming the city from sunrise to sunset and absolutely exhausting myself because I do very badly at sitting around and twiddling my thumbs and I think there is a great pleasure in creation and playing around with words and figuring out how not just to express myself but to summarize strains of history or we tell myths or anecdotes that I've heard in the past and this is just such an ongoing compulsion that if I stop then that doesn't feel”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knowing that they are spending their 20s in a field that will not reward them and means that they probably will have to start completely over in a different career once they've graduated.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a lot of reasons why grad students I know today are deeply depressed and pessimistic about their future prospects and the first is that the job market is awful. I mostly know humanities students, right? People who study English literature or comparative literature or philosophy or American studies, etc. And I'm curious if you disagree. This might be one difference between the grad students I know and economists, which is that if they don't get a job in which they're able to teach and research those subjects, then there aren't a lot of other all academia prospects where they can put those skills to good use. I mean, I can think of vanishingly few tenure track jobs in English and even fewer industry jobs that value the ability to critically read, I don't know, Jane Austen, right? So maybe that's part of it.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's interesting. I am tempted to agree with you that grad school should be the happiest time of your life and that really grad students don't have all that much to complain about because when you think about the setup, you're being paid to just read and talk and research about the questions that are the most interesting questions to you in the world. That's why you would have entered the field. And there are very few obligations other than teaching and again teaching should be a great pleasure because you get to enter the classroom and talk about that which is most interesting to you. That being said”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really simple. I just end up writing stories about where I am, what I'm eating, what I'm looking at, where I'm walking, what language I'm living in, what stories I'm hearing. And I think all writers are inspired by where they are. So when I was writing the popular trilogy, or at least when I started, I was living in Beijing. Then when I started writing Babel, I was at Oxford. When I wrote Yellowface, this was during mid-2021 so we were all at home and largely existing on the internet, which was the worst place to be. And now I'm writing a book that is nominally set in hell, but psychologically set in a PhD program.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, when we have public figures who are more interested in putting each other down and proving that they've done more research, they're more clever, they have quippier turns of phrase rather than pursuing some kind of collaborative search for the truth.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You simply can't affirm or negate most of the resolutions that high school debaters are asked to talk about and I think debate encourages thinking about these statements in terms of the truth and in terms of who's right or wrong rather than what are all the sides of the statement and how can we sift through all of the voices and conversations going on to arrive at a compromise that benefits the most people and since the point of debate is to win right you are naturally not thinking about well what are the things my opponent is right about this is not a good instinct to take into college it will make you the asshole in discussion seminars if you are only concerned with being right and getting the crowd on your side rather than seeking the truth and it's especially not good for public office I think it's devastating”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know you've got to come around and get right to the point, the core, the center, the electric sentence that the reader is really there for. And I don't strike that chord all the time, but I know when I have. And I think debate has been very valuable in inculcating that instinct. But there are, well, you didn't ask this, but I think there are lots of things that debate is not good for.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of electric sense of knowing when you've connected with an audience because especially in the final speeches, right, when you have to tie everything together and you only have three minutes to make all your most important points, and especially later on in a tournament where the rooms might be packed with spectators, you have this spidey sense of when a sentence you've just uttered resonates with the crowd. You can feel the crowd's energy. You know exactly what to say that will get people on your side. You know how to phrase things in the most concise and affectively compelling way, which is not to say I'm always very good at this, but I always knew when I had done it successfully, and I think that translates into writing compelling fiction because you know when you're boring the audience, you know when you've gone on too long about a tangent that nobody really cares about, you have that ticking quack in the back of your head.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am still friends with a lot of debate coaches, a lot of the folks who I competed against or was on a debate team with they still work and debate education and they coach debates. So we actually have a lot of conversations about how we think it benefits high schoolers, how it trains us to think what debate is good for, and also what debate is not good for. I think there are two main benefits I took from debate. The first is that I've never been afraid of public speaking, at least not since ninth grade, and this is a tremendous advantage, especially if you're being sent out on book tour. It is really good not to get stage fried before you step out in front of hundreds of people. And the second thing I took away from debate is this.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for a long time I had a bit of a southern twang in my English and my parents were very tickled by this. Well first I had a pretty Obvious Chinese accent, and then as I spent more time in American public schools, I lost that and developed quite a Texan accent. And they thought it was the funniest thing in the world. So sometimes they would have dinner parties and invite Chinese American friends and they would ask my sister and I to come downstairs and recite the Pledge of Allegiance in the most exaggerated Texan accent we could. And everyone thought it was great fun. So there's some deeper point here about identity and accents and linguistic play, but that's just the first thing that comes to mind.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I just think it looks really fun on screen. I think there is something to be said for spaceships or alien craft that resemble animals to us because it's an easy pattern that we can fit them to in terms of how they move and how we assess them as threats. And also importantly, it gives an easy solution for low-tech rebels to attack.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they are very vulnerable to these quick judgment statements. And when you look at everything in binary reductive terms, then of course tribalism becomes a threat and it's easy to devolve into Even people you disagree deeply with might have a point.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's right. There is the protection of anonymity if you're just a string of letters you can spew whatever you want and not deal with the consequences the same way you would if you were sitting next to somebody in real life. I think another complicating factor is that the internet is so distracting and it doesn't encourage us to think in nuance or to slow down or consider multiple sides of a problem. It is an immense amount of stimulation all at once and it rewards quick, easy reductive judgments. I mean this is how many tweets go viral, right? They're very funny but they also use a shorthand to capture some kind of emotion or quick judgment statement about a problem and usually it's problems that resist”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sure that it's much easier to do with nonfiction, and I also can only speak for my own relationship to writing. I'm sure there are lots of other authors who would happily work with co-authors, but it is such an intimate process that involves a deep understanding of every character and also deep understanding of yourself, I think that I become a different person with each novel I write and everything is a bit like therapy in a sense. Not that I'm exactly chronicling my emotional journeys, but they have to do with what's troubling me at the time and what questions are acutely bothering me and who split this psychological burden across two people would mean that not only do we have to clarify our relationships to the text, but we'd also have to clarify our relationships to each other. So yeah, we would end up killing each other or getting married.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“almost impossible to merge your voices into an organic whole while taking into account the multiple changes and creative differences that are going to crop up along the way. I mean, I'm so territorial and persnickety about my work that I refuse to show early drafts to anybody until there's a fairly clean initial version that we can then hack apart and make edits to. But if somebody asked me to co-write a novel with somebody else, I mean, only one of us would be alive at the end of the process.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem with co writing a book is that it's really hard to designate who's in charge of what when all the pieces are constantly in flux and at least my writing process means that anything can change at any given moment, a sentence that I really like in Act 3 might mean that I go back and change any number of things about Act 1. First of all, logistically, that just makes it a nightmare for the other person to keep announcing that you've changed your mind about the direction of the book. But unless you're writing a book such as, for instance, this is how you lose the time war, which is told in epistolary format where the two co-authors just wrote the two different perspectives of the two main characters, aside from cases where their narrative chunks are very clearly delineated.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps just that writers are impossible to work with and will become possessive and act like divas about their creative territory. But well, I don't play in a band, so I don't know if writing music as part of a group is different in that everyone has their designated roles like the vocalist focuses on the vocals, the guitarist focuses on the guitar, etc. Maybe watching that Beatles documentary would help with this actually.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe. Again, I'm not a historian, so I don't have a lot to say about this. I just think it's pretty tricky to argue that places prospered solely due to British presence when, you know, without the British, there are lots of alternate ways things could have gone and we just don't know.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true that there is a lot of contemporary nostalgia for the colonial era, and that would take hours and hours to unpack. I guess I would say two things. The first is that I am very hesitant to make arguments about historical counterfactuals such as, oh, if it were not for the British Empire, would Singapore have the economy it does today, or would Hong Kong have the culture it does today? Because we don't really know. But also, I think these broad comparisons of colonial history are very hard to do as well because the methods of extraction and the pervasiveness and techniques of colonial rule were also different from place to place. So it feels like a kind of useless comparison to say, oh, why has Hong Kong prospered under British rule while India hasn't, etc.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as I sat with that for a while, I realized she should not be so disappointed to be on the early end of the Victorians, but rather that this too was an era of incredible change and also the start of incredible social inequality. And this is when the movements that later Disraeli and Gateskill and Dickens were describing, this is the seed of all that tremendous social change.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone has such a preference for the late 19th century when we think about the Victorian era and contemporary film and novels that are set in the Victorian era. They're all post the Industrial Revolution. They're post Dickens. They're post the inventions of all sorts of technologies that linger in our imagination as the steampunk Victorian era aesthetic. So when I was drafting Babel and doing some research into what technologies existed, what my character's lives would have been like, I was at first disappointed to find that I couldn't rely on shows like Penny Dreadful, right? Things said in the late 19th century because a lot of that stuff had not been invented yet. And the reason why is because the Industrial Revolution was really kicking off in the early half of the 20th century.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do remember eating very well when I was in Beijing, but I was especially delighted with the soybean pudding in Taipei because that's a little difficult to get here in the States, I recall that even at the local Dimsum restaurant, you could only get it on Sundays at specific hours. And in Taipei, it's everywhere and it's so inexpensive. And there were weeks where I had it for breakfast every single day. And it was marvelous.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't lived in Beijing since 2015, so I couldn't say I do think the food in Taiwan was incredible and I miss it every day”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The red line headed to Beetho, and the old lady across from me, so I take a sip of water and she says, you can't do that. And I'm stunned, first of all, that she's talking to me, but also that you can't even drink water on the subway. But apparently this is a rule. And supposedly most people are lax about it and not everybody will get at ball in your grill like that old lady that did, but that rule did surprise me. Not sure what the reasoning is”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I can't compare with the eighties and 90s, so I couldn't say. I will say one thing that comes up with in conversations with all my friends in Boston who are asking, oh, well, what's Taipei like is that the public transportation is just so vastly superior to most public transportation in the US. I mean, the gerin system comes regularly, frequently there's a little sign that tells you at five second intervals how long until the next train, people line up, they queue to get on the train. There's actually little lines drawn on the platform so that people politely wait their turn. People don't eat or drink. Oh, yeah, actually, okay, here's my answer for what surprised me the most. I knew there were rules about no eating or drinking on the subway, but I thought this was just things that could have an odor, right, or could possibly make a mess. So we were on.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a great question because a lot of things were delightful and new and interesting, but I'm trying to sort through preconceptions about what life would be like, and if any of those was proven false in a really significant way. This is hard because I'd previously been to Taiwan in 2017, I want to say. So I knew a bit about what I was going to get into.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You seem like great advantages that I have Chinese family members and I also have Chinese classmates and colleagues at a department that focuses specifically on these topics. So I can just wander into a department talk or ask people what they're researching. But I would like to find some new sources and newsletters and podcasts that aren't just the hottest underdeveloped new take on Twitter, but that's a work in progress for me.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is actually something I need to figure out because I am scaling back significantly from all social media and following people whose opinions I respect and seeing what's going on. What's going on all over the world? And I no longer find Twitter very interesting place to be. I've recently read a lot of literature about how it would help us if we slowed down. I don't know, there's this term slow news that I really can't define for you, but boils down to being much more careful about the ideas that we're ingesting and turning them over and reading thorough comprehensive coverage than quick takes. But I have yet to figure out exactly what those sources should be. I'll take recommendations if you have them.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought it was entertaining as well. I guess the point I was going to make is that he uses shorthand and cardboard caricatures of characters much more than he's really interested in the interiority of much of his secondary cast. And I think this is related to his prose being very simple and unadorned and really just interested in the science ideas. And I think Ken's done a very good job with this simple prose and rendering it elegant without significantly distorting the voice or adding a kind of lyricism that wasn't there to begin with.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one and three are by Ken Lu, and two is by Joel Martinson, who's since done several of Lucien's other works, and I like all of them. I think I have a slight preference for Ken's literary style, and it might be because he's also quite an accomplished writer of his original fiction. I do not like the prose in Chinese, or I guess I wouldn't say I actively dislike it. I just find it incredibly utilitarian, and he's clearly more interested in the ideas than he is in writing very beautiful, elegant, descriptive sentences. I think this comes through especially in his character work. I mean, you must have had this. Oh, well, let me ask you, what do you make of the non-Chinese characters and how they're represented?”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, there isn't a single official translation for each one of them, but there are different translators for the novel. Oh, yeah.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alien's plot twist was spoiled for me very early on, so I went in knowing who the Tricillarans were and what everything was gearing up toward. So I wasn't confused for the first hundred pages, but I've heard from other people that you're actually not supposed to know that they're aliens and it's supposed to be a great shock when you find out.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had only read volume one for a while and then I read volumes two and three later on after it became more of a global phenomena and I really loved volume one. I think it's my favorite.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The point basically is it's not that good works are not being produced in Chinese or that they're being produced in narrative frames or writing styles that are indecipherable or unattractive to Anglophone audiences. I think that kind of cultural determinism is a little bit silly. I do think that there just aren't enough roots of translation and roots through the market so that the average Anglophone reader either hears about these works or has access to them from a publisher that's poured a significant amount of marketing money into them. I do think that most of the readers I know who are curious about reading outside of English have heard of Moyen and have heard of Gao Xingzian and the dream of the Red Chamber, but maybe my circle of acquaintances is much more China focused than the average circle.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of literary economy and world literature I'm thinking of really start with Pascal Casanova's The World Republic of Letters and she makes some good points about the Latin American authors here and how they have traveled in translation and she also brings up the fact that you see a lot of writers from formerly colonized territories becoming her term self-translated men who deliberately choose to move into English in order to get closer to the literary center of the Anglophone and Casanova doesn't talk specifically about the Chinese case but a lot of people employing her framework later do so you may also be interested in Julia Lavelle's work on China's quest for the Nobel Prize why in fact did it take so long for any Chinese writer to win a Nobel Prize in literature and I've quoted a lot of existing literature here but”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Linguistic inequality, and there's a whole host of theory and literature about this, so none of this is really original argument. And it gets back to a paradigm called world literature, which means a lot of different things. But broadly, when we think about literature as produced in different languages and the movements within those, and we compare them on a global stage and look at what's gaining a readership, what isn't, what is moving through translation, what isn't, and in which languages we associate with literary prestige, this is clearly influenced by history, geopolitical movements, and doesn't just boil down to, oh, our good works being produced. Kind of reception have they been anticipated to receive before they've even had the opportunity to travel? So the kind of”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, never thought about this comparison. It wouldn't have been my instinct to argue that more educated or literate Anglophone readers would have read Marquez or Borges than they would have the Chinese Nobel laureates, but I don't know. We don't have the data on that, or maybe somebody does. I don't have it at hand right now. My instinct though is to make an argument about translation and global literary prestige and”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The authority to talk about China who do we consider a Chinese expert or an expert on China and how do those imaginations of foreign countries change over time and I think those are some of the questions that I gravitate towards and might end up dissertating about.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it's good that I don't because I am in one of my last years of absolute freedom and exploration, which is the year that I study for my qualifying exams, which means that I have about fifty texts that I have to read for three subfields, which is 150 to 180 texts total, and this is spread across modern Sinophone literature, Asian American literature and Asian American history. And the hope is that at the end of all this intensive reading and thinking and drawing connections, I will have solified the questions that I will write my dissertation on, but right now I'm still mucking around and having fun and casting about for new ideas. I did just finish Hua Su's A Floating Chinaman, which is a text that thinks very much about the Trans-Pacific imagination.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I actually did history as an undergrad once I realized, well, I started off doing international economics and then I came back and realized I only wanted to do history, but then as I did my master's degrees, I realized that in studying history, I was drawn towards narratives and the stories people told about historical events and literary history much more than I was interested in things like military history. There was a time when I thought I would become a military historian and obviously I'm not. So now I do literature. I came back and applied to study modern Chinese literature, specifically modern Sinophone literature. There's a distinction between Sinophone and Chinese, which really has to do with, are we talking about writers who are writing in Chinese but not necessarily for or from the mainland? And so now I look at the history of literary movements and how historical events are represented in”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Chinese certainly didn't think so, and it kicked off a whole lot of domestic protests that led to a lot of people would argue some sense of national awakening, the development of national consciousness, a rally around the flag motivating effect. But certainly the Chinese did not get what they were hoping for from the Treaty of Versailles.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People say this about editors as well when editors point out flaws in a manuscript. They're almost right about the problem. They're a point of data that says this sentence, this plot twist, this piece of character development is not sticking, not resonating, but the solutions they offer aren't necessarily the right ones. And Jean was very good at explaining to you where structurally things had fallen apart and then stepping back and letting you figure out how to fix it because you can't fix it in the voice of somebody who thinks they know their story better than you. You have to find an organic solution that helps you express what you are trying to say all along. So I think that would make for a good writing instructor someone who's not too overbearing basically.”
2024-01-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source