Taking Levi's elemental “plot-complex” as a starting point, this lecture with explore the ethical correlations between elemental perception and the witnessing of the unwitnessable in Levi's memoirs. By incorporating the phenomenologist Levinas into this discourse, the lecture will further address the profound, indissoluble intimacy existing between material elements and the corporeal beings. This trajectory leads towards a broader cosmological understanding of life and survival. In this sense, within the historical progression from the Anthropocene to the post-human era, individuals of the present share a hidden in-depth elemental “plot-complex.” This narrative not only intricately weaves a web of ethical relations among subjects but also, by scrutinizing the profound depths of each corporeal mind, offers an alternative approach towards nature for individuals ensnared in the fragmented existence of technological society.

About the Speaker: Ding Pengfei

Pengfei Ding, PhD in Chinese Language and Literature of Nanjing University, Associate Professor of the Department of Chinese at Xinjiang University, engaged mainly in research on the criticism of materiality phenomenon in British and American literature and cross-media art criticism. His published papers in recent years include “On Ethics of Corporeal ‘Immediacy’ in Primo Levi’s Survived Memoirs through Cognition of Elements”, “Toward Affect-Memory of Alienness: On the W.G. Sebald’ s Works of Materiality of Photographs”. His academic monographs that will be published in recent years include “Material Writing: A Study on Sebald’s Works” and “A Study on the ‘Contemporariness’ of Literary Criticism: From Biopolitics to Outside Emotion”.