The Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University will host two guest lecturers Thursday and Friday, March 9-10, in the library auditorium on the first level.
Steven Riep, a BYU professor of Asian and Near Eastern languages, will discuss “The Moral Universe of Chinese Martial Arts Cinema” for a House of Learning Lecture Thursday at 2 p.m.
On Friday, Columbia University’s director of poetry, Lucie Brock-Broido, will read from her own works as part of the English Reading Series at noon.
Both lectures are free and open to the public.
Riep will trace the martial arts genre throughout the years, beginning with early historical narratives to martial arts films of today. He will also discuss how the moral values seen in the early narratives emphasized such character traits as altruism, loyalty and justice, which differ noticeably from the class and relation-based ethics of the then-dominant Confucian order.
To help illustrate his lecture, Riep will show excerpts from classic martial arts films by such directors as King Hu and recent works by Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou and Feng Xiaogang.
Riep has taught at several universities and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Taiwan.
Brock-Broido has published three books of poetry and has received several awards for her work, including the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, the American Poetry Review Jerome Shestack Prize for Poetry, the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a New England Review Narrative Poetry Award.
She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the University of Virginia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Massachusetts Artists. She has taught poetry at Harvard and Princeton Universities.
For more information about the House of Learning Lecture Series or the English Reading Series, visit library.byu.edu.
Writer: Brian Rust
