WQ 2014 SLN TBA 5 credits
W 3:30-5:20 (the time may change to accommodate students'
schedule)
Place
MGH 238
Instructor: Prof. Yomi Braester
COURSE DESCRIPTION
How have modern Chinese writers, film directors, and
painters imagined personal and collective memory?
What has been the environment of political and intellectual debates in which
they are working?
How have the different media dealt with the topic of memory?
How has scholarship addressed these concerns?
The course explores these questions while providing a survey of contemporary
scholarship in China studies and memory studies.
Knowledge
of Chinese is not required, although the class is expected to be composed
mostly of students who know Chinese.
Based on language skills, students will be asked to read the materials in English,
Chinese, or both.
GRADING COMPONENTS:
Weekly responses, presentation, and final paper
SCHEDULE
Weeks 1-2:
Memory and nation
Lu Xun, Call to Arms (Nahan)
Chang Tsong-Zung, Reckoning with the Past: Contemporary Chinese Painting
David Der-wei Wang, “Introduction,” in C.T. Hsia, A History
of Modern Chinese Fiction, Third Edition
David Der-wei Wang, “Red Legacy in Fiction”
Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness”
Method
Maurice Halbwachs On Collective Memory (selection)
Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method”
Jérôme Bourdon, “Media Remembering: the Contributions of
Life-Story Methodology to Memory/Media Research”
Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia”
Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction (selection)
Week 3: Personal testimony
Hu Jie, dir. Though I Am Gone (Sui wo siqu)
Zhang Zanbo, dir. Falling from the Sky (Tian jiang)
Mei Zhi, F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years (Wangshi ruyan: Hu
Feng chenyuan lu)
Shoshana Felman, “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah”
Pierre Nora, “Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory”
Amit Pinchevski, “Archive, Media, Trauma”
Week 4: Collective amnesia
Koonchung Chan, Fat Years (Shengshi - 2013)
Fang Lizhi, “Chinese Amnesia”
Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves (selection)
Mobo Gao, The Battle of China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural
Revolution
David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern
Culture (selection)
Week 5: Built environment
Ning Ying, dir. I Love Beijing (Xiari taiyang nuanyangyang)
Jia Zhangke, Still Life (Sanxia haoren)
Wu Hung, “Between Past and Future”
Christine Boyer, Cyber Cities (selection)
Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (selection)
Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (selection)
Week 6: Postsocialist nostalgia
Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Chang hen ge) (Part I)
Jeremie Barmé, “Totalitarian Nostalgia” (in In the Red)
Zhang Xudong, “Shanghai Nostalgia: Postrevolutionary Allegories in Wang Anyi’s Writings in the 1990s”
Jie Li, Shanghai Homes (selection)
Wong Kar-wai, In the Mood for Love
Week 7: Post-nostalgia
Jiang Wen, dir. In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan
de rizi)
Wang Shuo, Playing for Thrills (Wan'r de jiushi xintiao)
Jeremie Barmé, “The Apotheosis of the liumang" (in In the Red)
Yomi Braester,
Marc Augé, Oblivion (selection)
Paul Ricoeur, “Memory - History - Forgetting”
Week 8: Language and memory
Yu Hua, China in Ten Words (Shi ge cihui li de Zhongguo) (“People,” “Leader,” “Lu Xun,” “Revolution”)
Close readings of selected texts
Week 9: Digitized memory
Tan Tan, dir. “Whose Eyes” (Shei de yanjing)
(Background reading: “Tan Tan Challenges the Norms”)
Ai Weiwei's self-surveillance
(Background reading: “China’s Ai Weiwei 4 Self-Surveillance Cameras ordered to shutdown, Beijing Gov’s 15 Surveillance Cameras still running”)
Thomas Y. Levin, “Rhetoric of the Temporal Index Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of Real Time”
Yomi Braester, “The Spectral Return of Cinema: Globalization and Cinephilia in Contemporary Chinese Film”
Anna Reading, “Memory and Digital Media: Six Dynamics of the Globital
Memory Field”
Week 10: Student projects