Mittwoch, 12. Dezember 2018, 18:30 - 20:00 iCal

from Walden to Beyond Beauty

“Stepping to the Music of a Different Drummer”

from Walden to Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above

SIN 1 Department of East Asian Studies
Spitalgasse 2 Hof 2 Aufgang 2.3, 1090 Wien

Lecture


How can we imagine a more “ecocentric” way of being in this disastrous age of global warming? What do we have to “see” truly in man’s relation to the environment to maintain the delicate but crucial natural balance between all organisms and the Earth? How can textual and visual works of art help with that awaking act of “seeing”? In response to the above questions, this seminar seeks inspirations from Henry D. Thoreau’s Walden and Chi Po-lin’s Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above, a 2013 flm which documents Taiwan in aerial photography to underscore the need for environmental reforms. This seminar, on the one hand, investigates what Thoreau has seen through his observations on the environment of Walden in the mid 19th Century. It brings to the fore the rich nourishment

of Thoreau’s insights of man’s relation to nature. In light of “the transparent eye-ball” in R. W. Emerson’s Nature, it further examines how Thoreau puts into practice Emerson’s transcendentalism—mostly to regard man, not as a ruler, but as an inhabitant, or a part

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Veranstalter

Vienna Center for Taiwan Studies


Kontakt

Astrid Lipinsky
Universität Wien
Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften
4277 43844
astrid.lipinsky@univie.ac.at