Directed study of modern Chinese literary and media cultures. Course provides both historical coverage and a grounding in various theoretical problems and methodological approaches. Topics include print culture, cinema, popular music, and material culture; emphasis varies from year to year.

This seminar will take the form of a workshop in the close reading of literary, musical, and cinematic texts. In particular, we will track specific formal qualities and their aesthetic effects across divergent media (print, recorded sound, and cinema) with an eye toward examining what makes for medium specificity, and what does or does not translate across divergent artistic practices and platforms. The qualities we will consider may include color, tone, and timbre; meter and rhythm; composition (plot, melody, motif); duration and brevity; volume and intensity; texture; and space. Through matched methodological and theoretical readings, we will work to develop, deepen, and refine our critical vocabulary. How can we approach these texts more closely, describe them accurately and vividly, and write about them with style, subtlety, and insight? Primary texts, driven in large part by student interests, will include a wide variety of fiction, poetry, films, and sound recordings from modern and contemporary China and Taiwan. While the seminar will not focus on any one particular period, thematic question, or theoretical tendency, we will explore the extent to which an insistent, proximate, and supple attention to form might open up new methodological possibilities, enable productive dialogue between literary, sound, and cinema studies, and enlarge our sense of the complexity of historical moment out of which the texts emerged.

Repeat Rules