About the Scholar: Lu Zeng grew up in China and attended Shenzhen Foreign Languages School in Shenzhen, China
When the world changed on 9/11/2001, the new enemy, terrorism, needed a new kind of hero. Lu suggests that just as the cultural trauma inspired by terrorism was created in part by media coverage of terrorist acts, the creation of “noir heroes” in the tradition of those of the 1940s and 1950s helped address the trauma. Two contrasting examples are The Dark Knight from the Batman series, who helps mitigate the fear of terrorism, and Francis Underwood of House of Cards, a US President who is a terrorist. Lu expects that future events will call for more noir heroes.
Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia. It is a paradisematic country, in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth.