Date of Award
6-2025
Document Type
M.A. Essay
First Advisor
Dennis Washburn
Second Advisor
Yiren Zheng
Abstract
This essay focuses on the mediation of spectatorship experience by “ephemeral media” in Liang Dynasty (南朝梁, 502-557) palace-style poetry and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film A City of Sadness (1989). Drawing from Alexander Galloway’s “the interface effects” in new media studies, I investigate how the diegetic “ephemeral media” in these two texts, such as dust, candlelight, silence, and writing, function as opaque interfaces that complicate spectatorship. I examine spectatorship experience from the angle of ephemeral media by looking at how they direct spectators’ attention from the world of representations to processes of mediation. Transplanting Xiaofei Tian’s notion of the “surplus” in her discussion of Liang palace-style poetry within the use of literature in classical Chinese literary thought into my context of media and spectatorship, I pinpoint the ephemeral media in their “surplus” existence in time, space, and in the interface of representational media – their ephemerality sustained by synesthetic and intermedial interactions in spectatorship. In doing so, I argue that their excessive ephemerality in the interface between the spectator and the mediated world creates a theatrical friction in the closed world of representations. What then distinguishes ephemeral media from the representational function of media is that with ephemeral media, affects for the spectator arise from the processes of mediation rather than representations themselves.
Recommended Citation
Wang, Yingyi, "Theatricality of the Ephemeral: Media of Surplus and Spectatorship in Liang Dynasty (南朝梁, 502-557) Palace-style Poetry and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989)" (2025). Comparative Literature M.A. Essays. 196.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/complit_essays/196
Included in
Chinese Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Visual Studies Commons
