Title: Baroque Revenge: From Shakespeare to Park Chan-wook
Date: 30 April 2024 (Tuesday)
Time: 1430-1630
Venue: Conference Room, 1st Floor, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Speaker: Dr. Louis Lo
Moderator: Professor Te-Hsing Shan, Distingished Research Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Abstract
Why do we need to theorize revenge? What is revenge? What is a revenger? Answers to these questions seem straight forward enough. Take the first question: Revenge is a counterblow to an offence or an injury. But why take revenge instead of forgive? For a sense of justice? But revenge is often excessive and produces more damage on the offender than the original crime. It is itself unjust and creates more rounds of revenge. An eye for an eye logic is said to be operating as a balancing act, but everyday experience tells us that it is not usually the case. In this talk I would like to try out an argument about revenge and its baroque nature by taking examples from literature (primarily Shakespearean revenge plays) and cinema (primarily contemporary Korean revenge films). The baroque style can be understood as excessive and exaggerated, characterized by theatricality and the stage, filled with contradictions and conflicts, operating in the realm of allegory, and its mood is melancholic. By enlisting theorists of revenge and the baroque including Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Deleuze vis-a-vis baroque critics such as Erik Roraback and William Egginton, I hope to arrive at an understanding of revenge that goes beyond what Nietzsche calls “the culture of revenge” which is reactionary, conservative, and spiteful.
Bio:
Louis Lo is Associate Professor at the Institute of Visual Studies and Director of Zhi Xing Art Space at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He obtained his PhD in Comparative Literature from The University of Hong Kong in 2006. His research interests include the history of ideas, the city in representation, and temporality in Asian cinemas. He is the author of Male Jealousy: Film and Literature (Continuum, 2008) and Walking Macao, Reading the Baroque (HKUP, 2009, with J. Tambling). His recent articles appeared in The Right to Resist: Philosophies of Dissent (Bloomsbury, 2022), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies (2022), and Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures.