About this Event
The Northrop Frye Centre welcomes Fan Xu, NFC Doctoral Fellow, to deliver our first Doctoral Fellow Lecture of 2026-2027.
About the talk
Requiem for Childhood? A Conversation with Emil Cioran and Marcel Proust
Is childhood such a standalone and unique period in a person's life that, irrecuperable, once over, it can only be reminisced or has to be moaned? How to possibly "liberate the childhood" in us; and, what for? This talk seeks to underscore yet at the same time demythologize the redemptive quality of childhood through reading a few telltale texts penned by the inconsolable anti-philosopher, Emil Cioran, and the unrelenting time-searcher, Marcel Proust.
About the speaker
Fan Xu is a PhD candidate from the Department of French at the University of Toronto. Commingling critical philosophy and literary discourses, his dissertation reads Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu through Adorno’s negative dialectics (and vice versa) to probe the epistemological, esthetical, and ethical implications of the act/notion known as “identification” — yet to be reproblematized.
He strives to conduct non-caricatural readings of so-called negative sentiments (despair, nostalgia, pessimism, etc.) in hope of foregrounding their “feeble messianic force (schwache messianische Kraft)”, particularly vis-a-vis “the obsolescence of human beings (Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen)”. Straddling different cultural spheres and time periods, his research interests include anthropology of images (Didi-Huberman), Proust studies, Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Adorno), comparative philosophy (Zhuangzi, Rousseau, Cioran), and mystic poetry (Dickinson, Pessoa).
Event venue & nearby stays
VC102, Victoria College, Toronto, Canada
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