Dr. Kang-yen Chiu from the Department of English, FLS, also the convener of this series, gave a welcome remark before the lecture began. The idea of organizing this event was first brought up by Professor Huang Guowen and Professor Tong Qingsheng. It is their wish, by staging this event, to enliven and strengthen the atmosphere of literary studies at FLS. The seminar series is designed to be a cross- and inter-disciplinary forum where faculty members can meet, form connections, debate and collaborate on all issues pertaining to literature, culture and society. This monthly seminar takes place on Thursdays. Each seminar will consist of one forty to sixty-minute paper followed by thirty-minute discussion. This series belongs to every one at FLS. “I hope the School Seminar Series will last long and become one of the school’s good traditions. Participation and support of fellow colleagues are key to its long-term development.” Chiu finalized.

The welcome remark was followed by the lecture. By offering a critical narrative of the new realities of Empson’s time, how he was affected by them and how he reacted to them through his work in wartime China, Tong gave a profound illustration of Empson’s life and his most renowned critical view, that of ambiguity. For him, coming to China and extracting from the British community is an evasion from the predicament of life, also an escape of courage on realising life itself as predicament. By self-exiling, Empson attacked on the tact of British society. At once in deep belief of the potentials of meaning, he sought alternatives for the limited normality by standing outside of it. During Empson’s two separated stays, he went up the ‘Sacred Mountain’ and joined the ‘Lianda’ exodus; he taught, wrote and ceased to write. Isolated in his own country, he found here a community of sympathy and a fulfillment of new capacities of poetry, critical practice and life. In the disparity between war and academic work, turbulence of reality and intellectual ideal, Empson managed not only to sustain a continuity and consistency of his courage and decision but also exerting from it a synthesis of literature, criticism and love, the synthesis of ambiguity. He saw his toiling as always forward, for ambiguity in its real sense is not negation of meaning but piety to meaningfulness, that by defying singularity it strives for space in which meaning can create and recreate.