Course Code and Course Title
[CHES3200] Advanced Chinese Literature Seminar
Time and Venue
Wed 8:30am - 11:15am
ARC_211
Instructor
Dr. Yunwen Gao
Course Description
This course considers the configuration of space, place, and identity in relation to languages, gender, and social class in Sinophone literature and culture. Engaging the issues of multiculturalism, linguistic plurality, narrative heteroglossia, and transnational im/mobility. This class probes the concept of the Sinophone and how it relates to, complicates, and challenges China and Chineseness. What is the Sinophone? How does it inform our readings of texts produced outside and on the margin of China and Chineseness? In challenging existing centers of power and hegemony, does the Sinophone form new centers? How does migration during different time periods and across different space shape the cultures of these Sinophone sites? Building on recent scholarship on Sinophone studies, this course draws on postcolonial and postmodern theories to examine a culturally and geographically diverse body of contemporary Sinophone fiction and film.
Course Outline
I. THE SINOPHONE, SPACE, PLACE, AND IDENTITY
Space and Place
II. HONG KONG: DISAPPEARANCE AS CULTURAL POLITICS
Hong Kong from an Outsider’s View
Hong Kong as Space and Place I
Hong Kong as Space and Place II
Hong Kong as Space and Place III
III. TAIWAN: COLONIAL PAST AND MULTICULTURALISM
Taiwan as a Colonial Space I
Taiwan as a Colonial Space II
Taiwan as a Colonial Space III
IV. SHANGHAI: NOSTALGIA AND LOCAL IDENTITY
Shanghai Dialect and Local Identity I