The class of Romancing the Nation in Modern Chinese Literature (2021 fall) created a few sites revolving around the themes of love, marriage, labor, migration, and redness.
Labor through Literature: A History of Labor in Modern China
The Chinese Migration Struggle
2020 was a chaotic year in America, with the presidential election, the pandemic, and so on. I designed and offered a new course titled Overseas Encounters: Reading the World through Students Abroad. We read and discussed the history and literature about international students in the world from the seventh century China to the 21st century America. We also explores themes related to those experiences: religion, culture, gender, language, etc. Below are some projects my students created to document their discoveries.
The Overseas Encounter of Bhangra
Viewing Cultural Interactions Through Different Lenses
The Legend of the Red Lantern is one of the eight modern operas during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). It was based on movies and novels produced in the preceding decades. It was a work of art as well as propaganda for decades in contemporary China. The episode performed by Isaiah Degen features the interrogation of a Communist army member by a Japanese military official. Isaiah innovatively plays both roles by himself.
Peony Pavilion is a Chinese opera composed by Tang Xianzu (1550-1616). It is often compared with Romeo and Juliet due to their shared themes of love and death. After discussing part of the drama with a focus on the protagonist Bridal Du’s death caused by lovesickness, a group of students came up with their own ways to dress up and read/perform the encountering in dream between Bridal Du, her lover Student Liu, at the presence of a God of Flowers.
The Orphan of Zhao is a canon in the repertoire of classical Chinese drama. Composed by Ji Junxiang during the 13th century, it is arguably the best “tragedy” in premodern China. It was also the first Chinese drama ever translated into European languages.
During the spring semester of 2020, a group of students in US and Asia collectively produced this play on the platform of Zoom. Because most of the could not meet in person, they made the best use of the online platform to present a virtual version of the ancient historical play.
The Injustice to Dou E is a Chinese opera written by Guan Hanqing during the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). the story is about a widow who is wrongfully accused of murdering her father-in-law. The original play was composed for performance with dialogues and arias. A group of students produced an animated version of this play during fall 2020. Because of the pandemic, many of the students could not meet in person so they communicated online and completed this amazing project.
A podcast interview with me on Staging Personhood just came out on New Books Network. Many thanks to the host Sarah Bramao-Ramos for putting in the efforts to make this happen.
During the Covid19 Pandemic, students in my class Self and Society in Premodern Chinese literature created a group of StoryMap projects to explore issues such as gender, ghosts, and poetry of seclusion.
Mohism’s Defiance towards Confucianism
Romance and Resurrection in the Zhiguai Genre
Marital Love and Gender Roles in Human-Spirit Encounters
Memory plays a central role in literary production––one writes from memory and writes to make memory. Memory writing is always gendered––from the author’s self-perception to the constructed gender relations in literary works. The entanglement between gender and memory was particularly salient in early modern China (17th–19th centuries) with radical social changes and fast-growing literacy among women. Recent studies have paid much attention to gender-related literary writing of that period, especially in homosexual stories, works by women authors, accounts of female chastity, and writings involving medicine and emotion. However, the gendered construction of memory in pre-modern China is rarely studied. Focusing on cases in Chinese history, this panel interrogates the relationship between gender (sexuality) and memory in literary production. In particular, the session explores how memory writing engenders and enables negotiation with male-dominant literary discourses. The four papers in turn address the roles of memory in homosexual stories, hagiographic essays, garden writings within a family, and collective memories of historical changes.
GUOJUN WANG 