Elective

CLIT7016 Contemporary Chinese Literature and Film

This course will examine contemporary literary and filmic texts from Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora. Students will read representative short stories, essays, poetry, critical texts, and view selected films from the Post-Mao period to present. Texts will introduce students to major intellectual currents and literary and film movements of this period, including socialist and critical realism, modernism, postmodernism, and nativism. This course will also explore how forces of colonialism, urbanization, and globalization have drastically changed these Chinese societies. Students are expected to use literary, cultural and various interpretive theories to examine the historical changes taking place in Chinese societies over the past few decades, to understand the social problems and cultural aspirations that the Chinese have been preoccupied with, the patterns of urban life associated with various forms of consumption, and to approach those changes from both a historical and global perspective.