© photo by Jeff Day

Pu Wang

Pu Wang

Doctoral Student Fellow

Doctoral Student, Department of Comparative Literature, Graduate School of Arts & Science
The Phenomenology of Zeitgeist: Guo Moruo and the Chinese Revolution

Pu Wang received his BA and MA in Chinese literature from Peking University. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU. His research interests include modern Chinese literature and thought, Marxism and critical theory, aesthetic modernity from romanticism through realism to the avant-garde, and translation studies. His dissertation attempts a comprehensive study of Guo Moruo (1892-1978), a poet-scholar-politician of central importance to the making of creative mind and intellectual radicalism in revolutionary China. By focusing on this controversial figure, this study aims to examine some cultural-political phenomena of the Chinese Revolution — translation, political lyricism, the autobiographical self, the rewriting of national history, social scientism, and revolutionary romanticism — both as intensified patterns of a socio-historical experience and as deep linkages with Western traditions. Pu’s essay, titled “Enlightenment as ‘Romantic Science?’ Cultural Politics and Guo Moruo’s Rewritings of Ancient Chinese History,” appears in Rethinking Enlightenment in Global and Historical Contexts (ed. T. Nakajima et al. Tokyo: 2011). Pu also published widely on modern Chinese poetry in China. As a translator, he is currently participating in a collective project of translating Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk into Chinese. Pu is a recipient of the Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and joins the Humanities Initiative as an honorary fellow.

Pu is currently an Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature, Language and Culture at Brandeis University.