Courses

Fall 2012 courses:

AMES 274-1- Intro to Chinese Literature
Instructor: Bruce Knickerbocker                           TTh 3:30-4:50
Description:As an introduction to the outlines of Chinese literature from its ancient roots to its "modern" flowering in the Song dynasty (A.D. 960), this course aims to provide insight into the humanistic Chinese tradition. We will work through masterpieces of prose and poetry in a roughly chronological manner. These include lyrical masterworks in the various poetic modes, fiction from early strange and supernatural Daoist-inspired stories to adventurous and sensual medieval tales, as well as exemplary essays, parables and jokes, vivid historical writings, and profound philosophical pieces. Close readings of texts will enable you to gain intimacy and familiarity with this long and rich literary tradition and, more importantly, will also equip you with the skills to interpret and reconstruct traditions though reading texts, composing papers and designing presentations. Although it is impossible to cover all ancient, early and medieval Chinese literature in one quarter, you will leave the course with an enhanced sense of the richness and the wonder of this literature, a basic blueprint of China's literary development, and hopefully an interest in roaming through it further. Conducted in English.

AMES 290-20- Anthropology of Popular Indian Cinema
Instructor: Meredith McGuire                           T 2-5
Description: Popular films are cultural artifacts: they encode concepts and beliefs that reflect and shape how we think, talk about, and imagine ourselves and our world. Cinema therefore is a valuable resource for anthropologists who seek to understand the different ways in which people make sense of their everyday lives. In this course, we will explore the largest movie industry in the world: that of popular Indian cinema. Although best known in the United States for its elaborate musical numbers, the style and substance of Hindi cinema has changed profoundly in recent years. The films, and their audiences, are now said to be "global," with "Bollywood" movies regularly dominating the box office in countries as various as the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Malaysia. The globalization of Hindi cinema also has much to tell us about social change and globalization in India itself. Through close study of the cultural categories at work in popular Hindi films, and anthropological scholarship on Indian public culture and cinema, students in this class will develop a critical perspective on film, its place within Indian society, and its broader role in anthropological inquiries about the contemporary world.

AMES 390-20- Anthropology of China
Instructor: Stefan Henning                                MW 1-2:30
Description: This course introduces students to the cultural anthropology of China.  We will read closely five ethnographies and six articles that address themes central to the field: migration from rural China to urban centers, popular culture and the media in the cities, village life and the changes wrought on it by the economic reforms, the presence of the Maoist past in the present, ethnic difference and the Chinese state, and shifting approaches to the body, health, and medicine.  Together, these themes will familiarize you with the cataclysmic changes the Chinese, rural and urban alike, have gone through over the past thirty years when the commercialization and commodification of the economic reforms succeeded the planned economy and the totalitarian state of Mao.

AMES 391-20- Contemporary Chinese Cinema
Instructor: Peter Shen                                      MW 12-1:20
Description: The course offers a critical study of contemporary mainland Chinese cinema. We will examine the complex process by which directors in the post-Mao era have used the art of cinema to develop a unique visual vocabulary that reflects, responds, and articulates the radical sociopolitical, economic, and cultural and aesthetic transformation in mainland China during the past three decades. In the first part of the course, we trace the seminal cultural and aesthetic movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period marked by the radical refashioning of the then dominant socialist realism model as espoused by Maoist principles. Here, we turn to the visually stunning cinema of the Fifth Generation and focus on internationally acclaimed directors such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Tian Zhuangzhuang. In the second part of our study, we will study the cinema of the Sixth Generation, a group of innovative filmmakers that include Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai, Lou Ye, and Jia Zhangke, all of whom emerged after the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989. As we study their films, we will tackle a set of complex issues including the impact of migration and globalization, economic and social disparity, sexual politics, commercialization of the arts, and the meaning of independent cinema.

AMES 391-21- Modern Chinese Novel
Instructor: Peter Shen                                         MW 2-3:20
Description: This course offers a critical survey of the Chinese novel from the last decade of the late nineteenth-century to the contemporary era. Divided into four distinct historical periods, we will explore the question of how Chinese writers have turned to the novel to respond to the radical sociopolitical, linguistic, and cultural changes in the past century. In the first half of our study, we will focus on two masterpieces of the late Qing period¿ Han Banqing's The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai and Liu E's The Travels of Lao Can¿ and seek to understand the sociopolitical and cultural conditions that gave rise to these two distinct works. In the second part of our study, we turn to the period from 1917 to 1949 and examine a set of terms critical to the engendering of the modern Chinese novel: the vernacular, realism, modernity, revolution, and nationalism. We explore these terms in the novels of Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen, and Qian Zhongshu. In the third part of the course, we turn to Zhang Ailing and Wang Wenxing, two writers directly impacted by the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and examine how they used the novel to explore the condition of exile and relocation. Finally, we conclude by turning to works in the post-Mao era and examine how acclaimed writers such as Mo Yan and Wang Anyi have redefined the boundaries of the Chinese novel in a climate marked by intense historical reflection, sociopolitical reform, urbanization, and globalization.

AMES 391-22- Performance and Politics in Asia
Instructor: Elizabeth Son                                        TTh 2-3:20
Description: This course explores the relationship between performance and politics in Asian performance practices. We will look at various types of performances including: theatre, performance art, national day celebrations, military parades, mass games, show trials, protests, shaman rituals and hip-hop. In this course we will investigate the dynamic between states and embodied practices. States often rely on embodied practices to demonstrate power in order to govern citizens, while citizen-subjects employ performances to resist, critique and reconfigure social arrangements of power. What performance strategies are used to mobilize political action and to foster personal and social transformation? What are the risks of performing politics? This is not a survey of Asian performance, but an exploration of select performance genres from China, India, Japan, North Korea, the Philippines and South Korea. We will look at cultural performances such as Korean shaman rituals alongside the creation of staged productions such as Chinese revolutionary model theatre, in addition to global hybrid forms such as hip-hop. We will give special attention to the following themes: nationalism, spectacles of power, communities of memory and resistance, feminism and globalization. As we investigate theatre and social performances as political and politics as theatrical, we will touch upon key moments in modern and contemporary Asian histories.