Women in Chinese Lit

Fall 2009

Flowers in the Mirror:  Writing Women in Chinese Literature

Listed in: Asian Languages and Civilizations, as ASLC-40

Faculty

Paola Zamperini (Section 01)

Description

(Offered as Asian 40 [C] and Womens' and Gender Studies 40.) The focus of this course will be texts written by women throughout the course of Chinese history. We will deal with a wide range of sources, from poetry to drama, from novels and short stories to nüshu (the secret script invented by peasant women in a remote area of Hunan province), from autobiographies to cinematic discourse. We will address the issue of women as others represent them and women as they portray themselves in terms of gender, sexuality, social class, power, family, and material culture. We will try to detect the presence and absence of female voices in the literature of different historical periods and to understand how those literary works relate to male-authored literary works. In addition to primary sources, we will integrate theoretical work in the field of pre-modern, modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture.

Fall semester.  Professor Zamperini.

Offerings