On 14th May, Leo Ou-fan Lee – a renowned professor, writer, and cultural commentator – came to the TKU Tamsui Campus to deliver a lecture. His lecture took the theme ‘Lyrical Modernism in European and Chinese Fiction”.

Prof. Lee now serves as an Academician at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica. His views are incisive and unique. In the lecture, he observed that the Chinese way of viewing time through the unit of “dynasties” is restrictive, as it does not leave room for temporal notions used in other cultures. Prof. Lee also talked about several important groups and events in Chinese history, such as the eight-nation alliance and the May Fourth Movement, as well as their impact on Chinese literature.

Finally, he presented a cross-cultural comparative analysis of famous literary writers from the East and the West. He compared the works of Chinese writers such as Hu Shih, Shen Congwen, Yu Dafu, Lu Xun and Liang Qichao with that of respected Western writers: Herman Hess, Virginia Woolf, Joyce Porter, and Andre Paul Guillaume Gide.

The lecture was well-received by Tamkang students, who gained numerous insights into the nature of Chinese literature.