A Future between Hope and False Hope: Medical Humanities in Fiction and Film, East and West

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Medical humanities recently appears as an academic field first in the West and then in the East. Crossing the borders of nations and sciences, the humanistic approach extends the horizons of medicine to literary and cinematic inquiries about the experience of suffering. Are the promises of progression in technology and civilization an effective treatment for personal pains and collective socio-¬psychological crises? Is our hope for the curable future always already false?
We begin to deal with these questions with Wendy Larson’s comparative study of socialist and capitalist optimisms as reflected in the fictional works of Chinese writer Wang Meng and the American Beat Generation in the 1950s through her critique of the optimistic construction of a viable future. Li Meng scrutinizes the adolescent as well as allegorical search for hope in Hong Ying’s _The Hungry Daughter_, a novel about the female body that is traumatized by hunger, disease, nausea, menstruation, pregnancy and abortion. While Howard Y. F. Choy applies the Australian theory of narrative therapy to the positive outcomes found in the first Chinese psychotherapy fiction by a psychologist, Yuan-Jung Cheng contrasts the positive and negative representations of the medical profession in Japanese and American movies since the beginning of the new millennium, envisioning a possible future of progressive dialogues between medicine and humanism. Finally, Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai questions the discourse of the Chinese dream by investigating the market economy of medical cannibalism through the story of placenta consumption by Hong Kong film writer Lillian Lee.
This innovative, interdisciplinary panel includes five papers and plans to spare time for open discussion from the floor.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• Howard Y. F. Choy, Hong Kong Baptist University

Individual Presentations

• Optimism between Socialism and Capitalism: Wang Meng and the American Beat Generation - Wendy Larson, University of Oregon

• The Female Body between Trauma and Hope: Hong Ying’s "The Hungry Daughter" - Meng Li, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

• Expectations between Doctors and Patients: Positive Outcomes in Therapeutic Narrative - Howard Y. F. Choy, Hong Kong Baptist University

• Dialogues between Medicine and Humanism: Progressive Discourse of Illness in Recent Films - Yuan-Jung Cheng, National Sun Yat-sen University

• Modernization between Cannibalism and the Chinese Dream: A “Hope” for Rejuvenating the Nation in Dumplings - Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai, University of California, Irvine