CSL 220 -- Chinese Literature and Culture: An East-West Perspective -- Ban Wang

Come and learn about Chinese culture by reading novels and poems! Through reading historical narratives, fiction, stories, poems in English we will understand how the Chinese live, work, think, feel, interact, seek or yield to power, appreciate and create beauty, celebrate female charm and make love, face and die a Chinese death. In short we will know how they have built and sustained their civilization. We study images, characters, plots and motives as openings into the vast hidden background of beliefs, mentality and social relations embedded in Chinese culture. We will encourage Western perspectives to reveal the relevance of the Chinese experience to American readers. Requirements include a four page essay and 3 tests.

Required Texts:

Cyril Birch, ed. Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the 14th Century

Cyril Birch, ed. Anthology of Chinese Literature: Volume 2

Monday & Wednesday 3:20 - 4:40, Physics 112

CLT 500 -- Literary Theory -- Sandy Petrey

This course will explore the history of Western literary from Plato to the end of the ninteenth century through canonical works by major authors: Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Kant, Hegel, and others. The course's goal will be to situate the authors in relations to one another and to an influential work of criticism, Roland Barthe's S/Z. The grade will be based on an examination, an oral pesentation, and a paper.

Monday 3:30 - 6:30, Library E4305

CLT 607 -- Dostoevsky and the West -- Nicholas Rzhevsky

Dostoevsky's major novels explored in terms of his contacts with Western literary and intellectual traditions (Balzac, Dickens, Feuerbach), and Western readings of him (Camus, Woody Allen). The assignments will include Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, the latest in scholarship (Joseph Frank and Bakhtinian readings), and responses in popular culture (George Hamilton as Raskolnikov, Yul Brynner as Dmitry). Knowledge of Russian is not required, although encouraged.

Critical Bibliography:

Mikhail Bakhtin -- essays and study.

Joseph Frank -- 4 volumes.

K. Mochulsky

Donald Fanger

Tuesday 5:30 - 8:30, Library N3059

CLT 608 -- Trauma, Memory and Cultural Politics: The Case of China in the Context of Sino-U.S. Relations -- Ban Wang/E. Ann Kaplan

Drawing on current studies of cultural memory and representation of historical trauma, this course aims to illuminate the ways both the mainland Chinese and Chinese Americans grapple with and reconstruct their pasts. We will focus on the major traumatic events that affected the Chinese in this century: the imperialist invasion and colonization, the anti-Japanese war, the social upheavals and massive Diaspora, the political oppression in Mao's China, the Cultural Revolution, and the increasingly postmodern character of contemporary Chinese society.

We are interested in images and narratives about China's past in film and literature and the aesthetic assumptions that undergird them. We will probe into the question of how history can be psychologically "traumatic," not only for individuals but also for an entire culture; we will look at the relationships between trauma and politics and hope to explore how cultures undergo transformation in the wake of social upheavals, massacres, catastrophes, and war.

Integral to our concerns is the link and tension between the recent cultural practices in mainland China and those of Chinese living in the USA. How do Diasporan Chinese relate to and understand their links to China's past and its traumatic events? How can mainland Chinese understand the experience of Chinese Americans? How does the Chinese American imagination about China evolve as they develop new narratives and images about their ancestral homeland? How is China represented in American culture, especially in the media and popular culture?

We will turn to psychoanalytical research on the phenomena of trauma. We will look into history to locate the causes of the dramatic changes in China's political culture after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). We will use feminist theories to illuminate issues of gender in this period; and finally, we will seek to understand China's role in contemporary global scene by turning to political aspects of Chinese culture. In all four sections, we will attend self-consciously to issues of representation, of narrative, of the role of language in shaping cultural memory, and the intimate bond between memory and lived experience. These issues are broadly relevant in the humanities and cultural studies, and thus carry import beyond the case of China.

The course will be divided into 3 parts, and within each part, we will invite specialists in history, art, film, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and political science to lecture on topics in the course that pertain to humanities studies in general as well as to the specific case of China.

Thursday 3:00-6:00, Library E4340

EGL 603 -- The Marxist Tradition -- Michael Sprinker

A course on Marxism that focuses primarily on the classics in that tradition of thought, from Marx to Althusser. We'll approach Marxism from the vantage of key topics in Marxist theory, including: history, philosophy, art and aesthetics, politics, and ideology. The aim of the course will be to contest the currently fashionable claim that Marxism has no (or at the very least a totally inadequate) theory of culture.

The syllabus will encompass such figures as: Marx, Lukýcs, Gramsci, Benjamin, Brecht, Trotsky, Balibar, Jameson, Sartre, and Althusser. If students have time over the summer, it would be useful to read some surveys of aspects of Marxism like Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism or Fernando Claudin's two-volume study of the Communist International. These are not required, but they will help in orienting the class in the relevant political theory.

Requirements are regular class attendance and participation in seminar discussions, and a final research paper on a topic in some area of Marxist thought.

Wednesday 5:00-8:00, Library E4305

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