Coming Of Age In Modern China

This course guides second and third year students to read a series of coming-of-age narratives in Chinese literature and cinemas. It offers a range of literary and cinematic texts that not only ' enrich your understanding of modern China and improve your ability to read literature and film, but also provide you with a variety of coming-of-age narratives that may resonate with your own experience. Integrating academic pursuit with personal quest, I hope the course will allow you to reflect on your own experience of growing up and become more conscious in your negotiation with the current time.

Course content

• The modern discourse of youth.
• The Idealism of "New Youth".
• The desire to be modern: love and revolution.
• The revolutionary youth.
• The return of the individual in post-revolutionary China.
• Historical trauma and the small-town youth.
• Negotiating between East and West: coming of age as a Chinese-American woman.
• The loss of a world: youth and the changing politics of Taiwan.
• Coming of age in the creolized world of the rainforest.
• Made in Hong Kong: the lost youth and the reinvention of idealism.
• The Tiny Times of consumerism: Euphoria and Dystopia.