Ruochen Bo defended her doctoral dissertation, "Aesthetic and Ethical Entanglements in Edward Yang’s Cinema", on Monday, July 22, 2024. The committee consisted of Brian Price (supervisor), Meghan Sutherland, Elizabeth Wijaya, Sara Saljoughi, exam chair Deborah Black, and external examiner Victor Fan (King's College London).
We asked Ruochen about her work, as well as her plans for the future.
My dissertation looks at the first decade of Edward Yang’s filmmaking and examines how these films interrogate the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Through theoretical lenses such as incommensurability, skepticism, and postmodernism, I analyze his audiovisual designs—the spatial and rhythmic representation of the human psyche, both in and with the city—and suggest that Yang’s films reveal a complex proximity between perceptual insensitivity and ethical callousness, and that adequate interpersonal responses require us to continually break down and re-imagine the criteria of judgment we often unthinkingly take for granted.
I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Brian Price, and committee members, Meghan Sutherland and Liz Wijaya. They have given me so much help, support, encouragement, and guidance throughout this whole process. I also appreciate the time and effort of my examiners, Sara Saljoughi and Victor Fan, who have provided me with incredibly suggestive and helpful feedback. I'd also like to thank all the professors that I've taken classes with or worked with. I've learned a lot from their expertise and generosity. My time at the CSI meant so much to me also because of the awesome friends and colleagues that I've met here. Their companionship, both intellectual and personal, has given me much comfort and joy during this challenging yet rewarding journey.
I am excited to continue learning more about cinema and theory as an Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington in the coming academic year.
Her supervisor, Brian Price, had this to say about Ruochen's dissertation:
Congratulations to Ruochen on a brilliant dissertation and dissertation defense! Aesthetic and Ethical Entanglements in Edward Yang's Cinema is not only a deeply attentive, erudite and illuminating close reading of Yang's work (long overdue); it also opens major new questions about the relation between film style and ethical inquiry, film style as way of grasping the complexity of ethical demands, in and out of time, in and across cultures. The field will be reckoning with this work for a long time.
Congratulations, Dr. Bo!
