Medicine, Poison, and the Body Politic: From Mengxi bitan to Romeo and Juliet

Medicine, Poison, and the Body Politic: From Mengxi bitan to Romeo and Juliet

Zhang Longxi - Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation, Director, Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies, City University of Hong Kong

Thursday, March 2, 2006 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Room 211, Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS) See map
320 York Street
New Haven, CT 6511

Mengxi bitan (Conversations with a Writing Brush) by the 11th-century Chinese scholar Shen Kuo (1031-1095) and writings by several other Chinese writers provide a useful framework within which one can discuss the dialectical relationship between the poisonous and the medicinal, and to examine the curing of the human body as a political metaphor for the governing of a state. Medicine, poison, and the body politic thus become appropriate themes for a comparative study that crosses the boundaries of the East and the West and eventually leads to a new reading of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in which all these elements come together to offer some evidence for the value of cross-cultural understanding.

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