A Surreal Journey
June 2008 graduate Angela Chung found her path from law to comparative literature at the Extension School
Angela Chung is intrigued by surrealist stories, dream narratives, and other types of literature with a psychological bent, whether evocative of Freud or Jung. While studying foreign literature, language, and culture in the Master of Liberal Arts Program (ALM), she wrote her thesis on interpretations of fantastic literature, challenging the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov’s structuralist definition.
According to Sue Schopf, director of the ALM Program, Chung takes Todorov to task masterfully. “Angela’s thesis is among the most imaginative—and daring—I’ve ever seen,” Schopf says. “To challenge a major literary theorist such as Todorov, identifying flaws in an argument of his that had long been accepted as ‘doctrine’ among scholars, not only took courage but also a rare kind of analytical intelligence and a microscopic eye seldom seen at the master’s level.“
Chung wrote the 200-page thesis in only three months. How did she accomplish such a feat? “I’m extremely organized,” she says. She’s also a tireless researcher, having grown accustomed to spending long hours poring over thick legal tomes during her years as a lawyer in her native Hong Kong.
She says the transition from law to her new field of comparative literature was natural; both demand strong analytical skills. “I’m very methodical in that I’ll read everything, then highlight anything that could possibly be relevant,” she says. “And after doing all that, I go back, read it all again, and start distilling it—getting at the real stuff, the meat of it.”
Peter O’Malley, assistant director of the ALM Program, says that Chung’s dedication was in evidence throughout her work in the program. “Angela is one of the most energetic individuals I have had the pleasure of getting to know in my five years advising ALM students,” he says. “She took the doggedness of spirit necessary in her earlier practice of law, and applied it to learning as much as she could about the literature she loves.”
Such commitment is paying off: Chung graduated with a 4.0 from the Extension School and earned full funding to attend a doctoral program in comparative literature at the University of California at Riverside, which she began this fall. Thrilled to be finally on the path she’s always seen for herself, Chung intends to earn her doctorate as quickly as possible so she can begin teaching literature as a college professor.
Chung has spent much of her life between Hong Kong and Australia. She was born in Hong Kong and attended high school there, but she lived with her family in Australia from age six until her early teens. Chung returned to Australia for college, attending Bond University in Queensland. Although she developed an interest in books as a child, as an undergraduate she was steered toward a practical path—law. After earning a bachelor of laws degree, she practiced intellectual property law back in Hong Kong for eight years. “I was always really interested in studying literature,” she says, “and I chose to specialize in intellectual property because it was related to literature.”
But in the years that followed, Chung felt a pull toward her first love. She realized the next step in her career—to head toward partnership—didn’t interest her. At that point, she says, “I thought I could probably take a year off without it denting my career too much. And that’s what I said to myself: ‘I’m going to go off, try school for a year, and if it doesn’t work out and it turns out I’m abysmal at it, I can always go back.’”
At first, Chung applied to several British graduate schools but discovered that to study in Britain she would have to first earn a bachelor of arts. Disappointed but undeterred, she began conducting online research of other graduate programs and stumbled on the Extension School, which recognized her degree as equivalent to an American bachelor’s degree and offered a liberal arts program she could tailor to meet her interests and goals.
Originally, Chung planned to concentrate in literature and creative writing at the Extension School. She enjoys writing poetry and even had a poem published in the Charles River Review (see below), the school’s annual literary magazine of student work. But she found herself quickly drawn to courses in foreign and comparative literature, which she had not explored as an undergraduate. During her first semester, John Hamilton’s course Furor Poeticus (Poetic Fury) introduced her to comparative studies. In addition, Chung took two semesters of Arabic fiction with William Granara and enjoyed Gregory Nagy’s Greek literature course on concepts of the hero. “I liked it so much I followed [Dr. Nagy] all the way to Greece,” she says. (Nagy leads a Harvard study abroad program in Olympia each summer.)
At the Extension School, Chung took every opportunity to study with Harvard scholars. She was granted Special Student status for a semester, which allowed her to enroll in a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences course taught by Panagiotis Roilos, professor of modern Greek studies and of comparative literature. In the course, Dreams and Dreams in Literature, she discovered her thesis topic while preparing a presentation on Arthur Schnitzler’s psychological novella Dream Story. After her presentation, Roilos suggested she read Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Fantastic Literature. She read the book, collecting arguments against it along the way, then began choosing other stories—E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman” and André Breton’s Nadja—that could help support her positions.
Roilos, who served as Chung’s thesis advisor, was pleased to learn that her presence in class was motivated by more than personal enrichment—that she was planning to pursue a career as a scholar. “Professor Roilos pulled me aside after class one day and asked me what my plans were,” Chung says. “When I said I was applying to PhD programs, he said, ‘Oh good. I thought maybe you were just doing this for fun.’” He thought Chung’s analytical mind was well suited for the field of comparative literature.
For her doctoral work, she’s focusing on the study of arcane symbolism and alchemy. “I’ve always been interested in subversion and perversion and all these topics you normally don’t like to talk about in public with other people,” she says. Take a work of romantic fiction, for example. “What if in this book that’s always been classified in a particular genre there’s actually all this subversion going on that no one notices because the symbolism used is not something people would commonly associate with the genre? You might find a seemingly harmless text is actually not so harmless.”
She also takes a comparative approach to symbolism across cultures, drawing on Jung’s concept of a universal consciousness among all humanity. “I actually think it is a very good theory, though I know it’s been shot down a lot,” she says, “But you just can’t deny that there are some very striking parallels in the symbolism between different cultures. And it’s interesting to learn that they all evolved pretty much independently of each other and yet could mean the same thing.”
As a teacher, Chung would like to bring these types of ideas to college students. One day she hopes to teach at an American university during the academic year and in Asia during the summer. “I’d like to introduce Asian students to foreign literature,” she says. “I’ve talked to students in Hong Kong whose first exposure to literature was Chaucer and Shakespeare, and they hated it. Honestly, I sometimes find that material difficult and inaccessible. There’s a way to teach it that makes it accessible, but people don’t usually do it that way. They don’t often use modern culture [to illuminate old texts]. That’s what I want to do—to introduce an everyday relevance to what you read. I think that’s one of the ways you make it accessible.”
Chung would also like to introduce students to the thinkers who are dear to her—André Breton, Freud, Jung—and to teach students how to analyze texts across boundaries, whether cultural, linguistic, temporal, or philosophical. “That’s how comparativists come in,” she says, “to draw the parallels and make the connections.”
Weight: A Letter
You would have liked to know,
our beach is just the same. The sand
looks like it has never moved. A single grain
is weightless, but the beach remains
still, undisturbed, weighed down by sand.
The rocks we used to sit on
also look the same. They still wait for people
to touch them. Here nothing ever changes—but there
must have been corrosion, some transition.
What are centuries but moments
to rocks. They may have been forgotten,
but they are patient. They are heavy,
so they wait
while memories disappear
in foam, dragged out by the undertow,
with inflections distorted, then muffled
by the sound of steady humming below.
I never thought you would
overtake me. Three years—the sting
still rushes through me, still fresh,
still deep, still takes my voice away.
There is salt in everything here.
On this page you will never read, I am salt.
I am still yours.