UMass Boston

Chinese language and literature, comparative literature, film, and culture

PhD Princeton University

• “Inward Turns, Then and Now.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 9.1 (2022): 256-272.
• “Outside the Frame of World Literature? The Early Modern Examination Essay.” Situations 15.1 (2022): 5-26.
• “Who am ‘I’ in the Ming and Qing? First-person Dynamics in Modern Prose (shiwen) Examination Essays and Classical Prose (guwen) Prefaces.” East Asian Journal of Sinology 15 (2021): 9-73.
• Testing the Literary: Prose and the Aesthetic in Early Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2021.
• “Industry and its Motivations: Reading Tang Xianzu’s Examination Essay on the Problem of Excess Cloth.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 80.1 (2020): 85-122.
• “Hegel’s Portfolio: Real Estate and Consciousness in Contemporary Shanghai.” Chapter in Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China, edited by Carlos Rojas and Ralph Litzinger. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016: 62-86.
• “科舉文學與主體性的製造：八股文裡瞥見的吾和自己” [Examination Literature and the Manufacture of Subjectivity: Glimpses of “I” and “Myself” in Eight-Legged Essays]. Jiaoyu yu kaoshi 2016.2: 44-47, 96.
• “數字人文與科舉文學間的今古奇觀” [Digital Humanities and Civil Service Examination Literature: Wonders New and Old]. Zhongguo xueshu 35 (2015): 385-397.
• "Sleights of Capital: Fantasies of Commensurability, Transparency, and a 'Cultural Bourgeoisie.'" differences 24:3 (2014): 101-126.
• “Xinhai zhiji wenlun de chengqian qihou” [Early Twentieth-Century Literary Theory in Historical Context]. Chapter in Shuqing chuantong yu weixin shidai, edited by Wu Shengqing and Ko Chia Cian. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chuban she, 2012.
• Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007.
• "Burning with Reverence: The Economics and Aesthetics of Words in Qing (1644-1911) China." PMLA 121.1 (2006): 139-155.
• “The Rhetoric of Modernity and the Logics of the Fetish.” Chapter in Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature, edited by Charles Laughlin. New York: Palgrave, 2005: 17-31.
• “Building Shanghai, One Page At A Time: The Aesthetics of Installment Fiction at the Turn of the Century.” Journal of Asian Studies 62:3 (2003): 781-810.
• “Opium / Leisure / Shanghai: Urban Economies of Consumption.” Chapter in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952, edited by Timothy Brook and Bob Wakabayashi. University of California Press, 2000: 167-185.

Alex Des Forges has been teaching at UMass Boston since 2001.