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About the lecture
This talk investigates a classical tale of ancient China, The Three Kingdoms, tracing its transformation through time, across nations, and over different media platforms. Set in the third century, the story began as history, but was soon adapted into poetry, opera, novels, paintings, and, in the modern age, film, tv-series, animation, and video games. This talk will outline the narrative that leads from history to fiction to 16th-century novel and 21st-century game, focusing in particular on the way we can use the latest, digital reincarnations of this story to shed light on some of the more puzzling features of the premodern text.

About the speaker
Paize Keulemans is associate professor of Chinese literature at the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His interests are broadly defined at the interaction between literature and other media forms in the early modern period. His first book, Sound Rising from the Paper: 19th-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2015), explored this issue from the angle of sound, investigating the way a plethora of sound effects (onomatopoeia, dialect accents, vendor calls, etc.) turn the silent pages of printed novels intoa lively acoustic spectacle. His second research project, Idle Chatter: The Productive Uses of Gossip and Rumor in 17th-century Literature, explores the interaction between literature and other media through the lens of printed hearsay, rumor, and gossip in late-Ming and early-Qing novels and operas. His current project, Old Novels, New Games: Chinese Cultures of Play in the Late Ming and the Early Twenty-first Century, investigates the way the great vernacular novels of the Ming dynasty have been remediated as video game. .

About the lecture series
In recent years, literary and cultural works that evoke the cultural memories of classical Chinese traditions are gaining popularity in the global Sinitic-languages space and cyberspace. From literary to visual culture, from pop music to fashion, from state policies to daily rituals, these classicist articulations present Chineseness as complicated, multifaceted, multilingual, and cross-cultural. They raise important questions on the relevance of Chinese traditions today to China, to global Chinese communities, and to a future of »world literature«—as Goethe envisioned it nearly two centuries ago. In this multiannual lecture series, prominent scholars, writers, and artists will present fascinating case studies from their research or draw upon their aesthetic practices to elaborate on their understanding on these important questions. Such investigations demonstrate the abundant aesthetic and intellectual resources that the vast repertoire of Chinese cultural memories may provide to engage in a dialogue on the present and future of a global culture.

Concept of the lecture series: Zhiyi Yang, Professor of Sinology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften