Woman in Modern China Through Literature and Media

Catalog description

This seminar provides a chronological survey of women’s narratives in modern Chinese literature and culture from the late Qing to the twenty-first century. In this course, we will cover a wide range of genres that narrate women and their gendered experiences, including literature, visual culture, cinema, and digital media, and explore how womanhood is imagined, articulated, and contested in modern Chinese literature and culture. Moreover, we will attend to literary and cultural texts by female artists, and explore how female artists express their creative agency and mediate disparate gendered experiences. These critical and creative engagements with the woman question serves as a pivotal momentum in the development of literary and cultural modernity in China, and they also reflect the broader socio-political landscape and cultural ecology of modern China. Prerequisite: GPS Fulfillment: CORE IPC/HPC; GCS Elective Chinese Media, Arts, and Literature; Chinese Language and Literature Minor.