Chinese Scholar to speak on William Faulkner at CCU
“Professor Tao is one of China’s leading public intellectuals,” according to Charles Joyner, director of the Waccamaw Center and Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal. She is professor of English and deputy director of the Women's Studies Center at Peking University in the People’s Republic of China, as well as vice-president of China’s Association for the Study of American Literature and vice-president of the Chinese Association of Foreign Literature. She was a participant in the United Nations Fourth World Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995.
Tao is perhaps best known in the United States for her English-language publication of “Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future,” which she co-edited for New York’s Feminist Press in 2004. It is the first anthology of writings by and about Chinese women, revealing the long march toward equality, the realities faced by women in today's China, and the challenges of the future.
Among her other publications in English are her “William Faulkner: Achievement and Endurance” (1998), “Growing Up In the South: On Faulkner’s “ ‘Intruder in the Dust’ ” (1998), and “Repressed Silences: Faulkner’s Three Female Characters” (1995).
Tao has translated Faulkner’s “Sanctuary,” his “Intruder in the Dust,” and “Selected Short Stories by William Faulkner” into Chinese, as well as works by Alice Walker. Her scholarship in Chinese includes articles on Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Margaret Mitchell, as well as William Faulkner. She is editor of “Collected Essays on American Literature and American Culture” (2004) and co-editor of the five-volume “Twentieth-Century History of World Literature” (2005). Her current work-in-progress is a book-length critical study of William Faulkner. Tao organized international symposia on William Faulkner in China in 1997 and in 2004.
For more information, call 349-2015.