Exam Reading List Example 1


 

 

 

I. Literary Theory and Criticism

 

A. History of Literary Theory and Criticism

Plato, Republic (Book X)

--. Phaedrus     

Aristotle, Poetics

Horace, The Art of Poetry

Longinus, “On the Sublime”

Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry”

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry

Gotthold E. Lessing, Laocoon

David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste”

Friedrich von Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”

Immanuel Kant, From Critique of Judgment

William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of Art

Karl Marx, “Consciousness Derived from Material conditions”

Charles Baudelaire, *  “The Painter of Modern Life”

Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music

Leo Tolstoy, From What Is Art?

T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

 

B. Contemporary Literary Theory

 

i. Marxism and Culture Criticism

Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer”

--. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

--. * “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Georg Lukacs, Part I, 1-5, Part II, 4, from The Theory of the Novel

Terry Eagleton, “Introduction,” “Political Criticism,” from Literary Criticism

Siegfried Kracauer, “The Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces”

--. “The Mass Ornament”

Max Horkheimer and T. Adorno.  The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry Reconsidered”

Williams, Raymond. “Dominant, Residual and Emergent,” “Structures of Feeling” from Marxism and Literature

Frederic Jameson, “On Interpretation”

 

ii. Structuralism/Post-structuralism

Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth”

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

--. “From Work to Text”

Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”

--. The History of Sexuality. Volume One: Introduction

--. “Truth and Power”

Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”

--. “Signature Event Context”

--. “Plato’s Pharmacy”

 

iii. Postmodernism

Jean-Francois Lyotard,  “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Part I, II, & IV)

Paul Crowther, “Postmodernism in the Visual Arts: A question of ends”

Rey Chow, “Rereading Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: A Response to the ‘postmodern’ condition”

 

II. Genre: Feature Film

 

A. Films

Georges Melies, A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Edwin S. Porter, The Great Train Robbery (1903)

D.W.Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1926)

F.W.Murnau, Sunrise (1927)

Luis Buñuel, Un Chien andalou (1929)

Josef von Sternberg, Blue Angel (1930)

Ernst B. Schoedsack, King Kong (1933)

Frank Capra, It Happened One Night (1934)

Wu Yonggang, *Goddess (1934)

Charles Chaplin, Modern Times (1936)

Jean Renoir, Rules of the Game (1939)

Orson Welles, Citizen Kane (1941)

Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Michael Curtiz, Mildred Pierce (1945)

Jacques Tourneur, Out of the Past (1947)

Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli, *Spring River Flows East (1947)

Billy Wilder, Sunset Blvd. (1950)

Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon (1950)

Stanley Donen, Singin’in the Rain (1952)

Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo Story (1953)

Douglas Sirk, Written on the Wind (1956)

Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries (1957)

Michael Powell, Peeping Tom (1959)

Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho (1960)

Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless (1960)

Akira Kurosawa, Yojimbo (1961)

Terence Young, Dr. No (1962)

Federico Fellini, 8 ½  (1963)

Xie Jin, Stage Sisters (1965)

Michelangelo Antonioni, Blowup (1966)

Sergio Leone, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Andréi Tarkovsky, Solaris (1971)

Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange (1972)

Steven Spielberg, Jaws (1975)

Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver (1976)

Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (1979)

Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (1982)

Chen Kaige, Yellow Earth (1984)

Zhang Yimou, Raise the Red Lantern (1991)

Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven (1992)

Tsui Hark, Once Upon a Time in China (1993)

Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (1994)

 

B. Critical Works

 

i. Early Film Theory

Hugo Munsterberg,  “Introduction” “The Psychology of the Photoplay” “The Means of the Photoplay” from The Film: A Psychological Study 

Sergei Eisenstein, “Dialectic Approach to Film Form” “Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram” “Film Language” from Film Form

Dziga Vertov, From Kino-Eye

Rudolf Arnheim, “Film and Reality” “The Complete Film” from Film as Art

Andre Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema”  “The Evolution of the Language of the Cinema”

Siegreid Kracauer, *From Caligari to Hilter 

 

ii. Cine-semiology

Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology

Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema

--. “Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurisms”

Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema”

Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “A Note on Story/Discourse”

Colin MacCabe, Tracking the Signifier: Theoretical Essays, Film, Linguistics, Literature

Boris Eichenbaum, The Poetics of Cinema

 

iii. Genre Theory

Stephen Neale, Genre and Hollywood

Barry Keith Grant, Film Genre Reader II

Rick Altman, Film/Genre

Nick Browne, Refiguring American Film Genre: History and Theory

Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation”

Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury”

Wimal Dissanayake ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema

Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street

 

iv. Theorizing Spectatorship

Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russian and Its Cultural Reception

Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator”

Miriam Hansen, “Introduction” and Part I from Babel and Babylon

--. “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformation of the Public Sphere”

Judith Mayne, “The Paradoxes of Spectatorship”

Vivian Sobchack, “Phenomenology and Film Experience”

Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship

 

III. Period: Modern Times (1900-1940s)

 

A. Texts

 

i. Prose Fiction

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

André Breton, Nadja

Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman

Yu Dafu, Sinking

Ding Ling, The Diary of Miss Sophie

Natsume Soseki, Kokoro

 

ii. Drama

Anton Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard

Eugene O’Neil, The Hairy Ape

Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children

George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Antonin Artaud, The Cenci

Cao Yu, Sunrise

Xia Yan, Under Shanghai Evas  

 

iii. Poetry

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock

Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro

Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Cloud in Trousers,

--,  Brooklyn Bridge 

Wen Yiduo, The Dead Water 

Li Jinfa, The Abandoned Woman

 

iv. Photography

from Photography of Eadweard Muybridge

from Photography of Eugène Atget

from Photography of Alfred Stieglitz

from Photography of Weegee

from Photography of Aleksandr Mikhalovich Rodchenko

from Photography of Man Ray

 

v. Film

Sergei Eisenstein, *Battleship Potemkin

Dziga Vertov, Man with the Movie Camera

Fritz Lang, *Metropolis

F.W. Maurau, * Sunrise

Wu Yonggang, *Goddess

Charles Chaplin, *Modern Times

--. The Great Dictator

Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli, *Spring River Flows East

Fei Mu, *Spring in a Small Town

Kenji Mizoguchi, Genroku Chushingura

 

B. Critical Works

 

i. Criticism on Specific Works

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Natsume Sōseki, “My Individualism”

Liang Qichao, “On the Relation Between Fiction and Society”

Zhou Zuoren, Sources of Chinese New Literature

Bertolt Brecht,  “A Short Organum for the Theatre”

Antonin Artaud, from The Theatre and Its Double

Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,”

Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” “Diderot, Brecht and Eisenstein” from The Responsibility of Form

Christopher Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era

Graham Clarke, The Photograph

Patrick Maynard, Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography

 

ii. Criticism on Modernism

Charles Baudelaire, * “The Painter of Modern Life,” “Eyes of the Poor”

Jean-Paul Satre, “The Preface to inaugural issue of Modern Time

Walter Benjamin, *“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Harry Levin, “What Was Modernism?”

György Lukacs, “The Ideology of Modernism”

Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity – An Incomplete Project”

Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity

Andreas Huyssen. Chapter 1-3 from After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Part V)

Judith Walkowitz, “Urban Spectatorship”

Fredric Jameson. *Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, “Modernism and Imperialism,” “Note Toward a Theory of the Modern”

 

IV. Special Area:

Chinese Cinema and Its Cultural Practice from the 1930s to the 1950s

My project is to contextualize Chinese Cinema from the 1930s to the 1950s by examining Chinese cinema in different regions (Japanese-occupied areas, Nationalist-controlled hinterland, and Communist-controlled areas) over this turbulent period of time.  The research poses a series of questions: How to conceive Chinese cinema without falling into reductionism? How to perceive the extant film historiography and construct a new film historiography? How to understand Chinese cinema as a cultural force engaging in the process of Chinese modernization?  

 

A. Films

Sun Yu, Wild Rose (1931) 

--. Small Toy (1933) 

--. Big Road (1934)  

Wu Yonggang, *Goddess (1934) 

Ying Yunwei, The Plunder of Peach and Plum (1934) 

Cai Chusheng, New Women (1934) 

Luo Mingyou, Tian Lun (1935)   

Shen Xiling, Boatman’s Daughter (1935)  

Wu Yonggang, Zhuang Zhi Ling Yu (1936) 

Cheng Bugao, New and Old Shanghai (1936)

 Yuan Muzhi, Street Angel (1937) 

Shen Xiling, Crossroads (1937)   

Chen Liting, Far Away Love (1947) 

Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli, *Spring River Flows East (1947) 

Shi Dongshan,Eight Thousand Miles of Clouds and the Moon (1947)

Fei Mu, *Spring in a Small City (1947)

Sang Hu, Sadness and Happiness of a Middle-Aged Man (1948) 

Zheng Junli, Crows and Sparrows (1949)  

Ling Zifeng and Zhai Qiang, Zhong Hua Er Nű (1949) 

Wang Bin and Shui Hua, White-Haired Girl (1950) 

Zheng Junli, Nie Er (1959) 

Shui Hua, Lin Family Shop (1959)

 

B. Critical Works

 

i. National Cinema

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Mette Hjort, Cinema and Nation

Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema”

Stephen Crofts,Reconceptualizing National Cinemas/s”

Tom O’Regan, “A National Cinema”

Cheng Jihua, A History of the Development of Chinese Cinema

Jey Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China

Zhang Litao, Chinese Communist Moving Pictures History

Ding Yaping, Ying Xiang Zhongguo: Zhongguo Dian Ying Yi Shu 1945-1949                      

Chen Feibao, A History of Taiwanese Cinema

Paul Fonoroff, “A Brief History of Hong Kong Cinema”

Xia Yan, “Preface to Volume of Film of the Omnibus of New Chinese Literature (1927-1937),” “Opening Speech of Retrospection of Chinese Film: from the 1920s to the 1940s”

Li Shaobai, “Methodology of the History of Chinese Cinema”

Luo Yijun, “Cultural Tradition and Chinese Film Theory: Preface to Anthology of Chinese Film Theory,” “National Style of 1930’s Chinese Film”

 

ii. Cinema and Modernity

John Orr, Cinema and Modernity

Frederic E. Wakeman, China’s Quest for Modernization: a Historical Perspective

Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China

Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art”

Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “The Tradition of Modern Chinese Cinema: Some Preliminary Explorations and Hypotheses”

Rey Chow, “Seeing Modern China: Toward a Theory of Ethnic Spectatorship” from Women and Chinese Modernity

Ellen Widmer, From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth Century China

Shu-Mei Shih, “Introduction” from The Lure of the Modern

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Zhang Yingjin, “Introduction: Cinema and Urban Culture in Republican Shanghai” from Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943

Esther C. M. Yau, “Compromised Liberation: The Politics of Class in Chinese Cinema of the Early 1950s”

Catherine Yi-Yu Cho Woo, “The Chinese Montage: From Poetry and Painting to the Silver Screen”

 

iii. Cinema and Trans-cultural Practice

Wimal Dissanayake, Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema

E.Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other

Lydia He Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937

Rey Chow, “Film as Ethnography: or, Translation Between Cultures in the Postcolonial World”

Poshek Fu, “Projecting Ambivalence: Chinese cinema in semi-occupied Shanghai 1937-1941,” “The Ambiguity of Entertainment: Chinese Cinema in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai, 1941-1945,” “Patriotism or Profit: Hong Kong Cinema during the Second World War”

Shelley Stephenson, “ ‘Her Traces Are Found Everywhere’: Shanghai, Li Xianglan, and the ‘Greater East Asia Film Sphere’”

Xiao Zhiwei, “Constructing a New National Culture: Film Censorship and the Issues of Cantonese Dialect, Superstition, and Sex in the Nanjing Decade”

Yu Mo-wan, “The Patriotic Tradition in Hong Kong Cinema: A Preliminary Study of Pre-War Patriotic Films”

Tony Rayns, “Missing Links: Chinese Cinema in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 1930s to the 1940s”

Hong Kong Film Archive, 50 Years of the Hong Kong Film Production and Distribution Industries

 

 

(List for Xiaoning Lu. Approved Fall 2003)