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 发表: 2004-09-03 00:49:07 人气:2134  | 楼主 |
Beijing Forum Figures: Mr. and Mrs. Owen, “No Culture Shock between us”
PKU News, Beijing, Aug 25th, 2004: Mr. and Mrs. Owen from Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures of Harvard University attended Beijing Forum and received interview from PKU News Center.
Mentioned Mrs. Owen, many people will remember her Chinese name Tian Xiaofei and her extraordinary experience during her growing up: entering Peking University at the age of thirteen, writing beautiful poems and proses, graduated from Harvard University and being a member of the faculty there. She is regarded as the combination of academic and creation. His husband Stephen Owen was the former director of Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures of Harvard University, he is also a highly venerated professor in classical Chinese literature.
After graduated from the English Literature Department of Peking University, Tian Xiaofei went to USA to study comparative literature. When asked the recent interest, she told us she is now very interested in three periods of time in the Chinese history: Wei, Jin and the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the late Ming Dynasty and the Cultural Revolution, for example, last year she published a book named “Golden Lotus: A Commentary by Qiushui tang”. She emphasized the importance of study the literature of Wei, Jin and the Northern and Southern Dynasties, although the history is very short. She is now working on a book about the palace culture of the Liang Dynasty, and she thought every aspect of literature of Liang Dynasty is very creative and the history does not give it a right evaluation.
When mentioning the relation between creation and academic research, Tian Xiaofei said she was still writing proses and poems in the meantime of his academic research. In her opinion, the academic research is the combination of reason and sensibility. The way of academic research which she prefers is based on the text, but the aim is to expose the beauty of literature. In nowadays the academic research of the classical literature places too much emphasis on reason.
Both of the couple have an agreement on the academic research that the diligence is more important than talent. They said that the smart is cheap, the accumulation of knowledge, especially the close reading of the text is the basis of everything.
When being asked the research situation of Chinese literature in the USA, Mr. Owen admitted that there are more and more Chinese people doing it and he hoped that the number of the Chinese scholars and the non-Chinese scholars would be equivalent. Moreover, Tian Xiaofei responded the question raised by the journalist about the difference between the departments of East Asian Languages and Literatures in the American universities and the Chinese literature departments in Chinese universities. She said the university systems in the two countries are different. In China, the students and the majors are distributed by the universities while in the USA the Chinese literature programs are under big pressure, everyone in the department has responsibility to prevent it from shrinking. Mr. Owen gave an example that the students who study Chinese literature in the American universities are less than those who study Japanese literature, but in Harvard the situation is just the opposite. It is all because of the faculty’s effort.
The romance of the couple is also very attractive. When Tian Xiaofei was a graduate student in the comparative literature department of Harvard, Mr. Owen was his tutor, but they did not begin their love story until her graduation. After she left school, they talked a lot about literature via Emails and found that they are really bosom friends. She told that the birthday of them is the same day and it is kind of a predestined relationship. When asked about the intercultural marriage between them, the couple said that they never felt that the other was a foreigner, after all, individual person is not the delegate of a certain country. The difference of culture does exist, but they never feel culture shock between them.
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