Critical Perspectives on Modern Chinese Literature

Catalog description

This course provides students with an overview of the core texts and main critical paradigms of modern Chinese literary studies. This course provides students with a comprehensive overview of the main critical approaches to modern Chinese literature, by placing these paradigms into historical perspective and linking them with key texts that illuminate the authors' arguments and demonstrate exemplary readings that have proven influential in the field, past and present. The particular focus of the course may vary according to the instructor (e.g. themes, genres, regions etc.), but the course will generally cover critical interventions and debates, helping students to understand the emergence of the field in its present form; they will also scrutinize major trends that are providing new directions for the study of modern Chinese literature. In addition to the critical literature, students will read a range of key literary texts, from the late Qing to the twenty-first century, that provide insights into the forces (aesthetic and intellectual, as well as social and historical) that have shaped the canon of modern Chinese literature. Critical analyses and literary texts are chosen in a way so as to illuminate each other. At the end of the class, students will have gained a sound grasp of the field and its literary and historical dimensions, and develop a critical understanding of the current challenges and directions of the study of modern Chinese literature. Cross Listings: CMLIT 577 will be added as a cross-listed course.