Literature Courses
Literature Courses
Guidelines for Self-Placement in Language Courses
AMES 133 Global Chinese Cities
Professor Carlos Rojas
Modern Chinese cities in and beyond China, particularly as represented in literature and film. Considers city as object of cultural representation, as well as an engine of cultural production. Examines themes of modernization, alienation, nostalgia, migration, labor, and commoditization, and rethinks the very notion of ¿Chineseness¿ within an increasingly globalized world. Featured cities include Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, and New York.
AMES 134S Discourse of Disease
Professor Carlos Rojas
Modern discourses of disease and infection. The transmutation of medical theory into a metaphorical discourse of social structure and individual identity. Cultural representations of modern epidemics, including AIDS and SARS.
AMES 138 Chinese Prostitution
Professor Carlos Rojas
Dialectic of prostitution as lived experience, and as socio-cultural metaphor. Focus on literary and cinematic texts, together with relevant theoretical works. The figure of the prostitute will be used to interrogate assumptions about gender identity, commodity value, and national discourse. Transnational traffic in women will provide context for examination of discourses of national identity in China and beyond, together with the fissures at the heart of those same discourses. Instructor: Rojas
AMES 141 Vampire Chronicles
Professor Carlos Rojas
Literary and cinematic representations of vampirism, from Dracula to Chinese jiangshi to Buffy and Twilight. Contemporary politics of blood-selling and blood donation, cross-cultural circulation of vampiric traditions, vampirism as a symbol of circulation in its own right. The figure of the vampire as embodiment of fundamental cultural anxieties about gender and ethnic alterity.
AALL 172S Chinese Lit in Translation
Professor Guo-Juin Hong
The transmutation of Chinese culture and literature from the perspective of translation conceived as a broad range of literary and cultural activities, including transactions between cultures, appropriation of a foreign work into a Chinese version, and adaptation of one literary-cultural form into another (such as literature into drama or film).
AALL 179/279 Melodrama East and West
Professor Guo-Juin Hong
Melodrama as a genre in literature and as a mode of representation in film and other media. Issues include: gender construction, class formation, racial recognition, and national identity building. (C-L LIT 151J; WS 179)
AALL 188S/288S Modern Chinese Cinema
This course introduces the new wave mainland Chinese cinema of the 1980s and the genre of entertainment films of the 1990s. Discussions will be focused on the formal experiments of the Fifth Generation of Directors, the politics of cinematic avant-gardism in the larger context of the intellectual-artists' search for modernity, and the influence of consumerism and nativism on the rise of entertainment films.
Films that we watch in class include "Human Woman Demon," "Divorce War," "Sacrificed Youth," "King of Children," "Good Men, Good Women," "Soccer Heroes," etc. and soap operas such as "A Beijinger in New York."
AALL 250S Chinese Media and Popular Culture
Professor Kang Liu
This course explores contemporary Chinese news media, the Internet, and popular culture including television drama, cinema, pop arts (comics and animations), pop music, dance, karaoke, cell phone text messaging, fashions, etc. within the context of globalization.