Art Revolution In Modern China

AY2020/2021 Semester 1

This course traces the literary and cultural history of modern China from the May Fourth Movement, the surge of revolutionary literature in the late 1920s, the formation and development of Maoist aesthetics under the socialist regime, to the reflection on revolution in the post-Mao era. We will end the course with contemporary engagements with the idea of revolution by looking at some realist literature from Taiwan, documentary films from Hong Kong, and the suppressed articulations of dissent in mainland China. The themes of art and revolution provide a specific perspective to revisit modern Chinese literary history. They highlight the political urgencies behind the renovation of national culture in the beginning of the twentieth century, and reveal how such imperatives continued to shape the changing contour of Chinese literature and culture throughout this long century. The focus on art and revolution also allow us to look beyond revolution in its most straightforward political sense, and attend to the revolution of gender norms and cultural forms that were equally important in modern Chinese history. We will pay attention to this multifaceted idea of revolutionary in our textual analyses of literary and artistic works. The texts covered in this course ranges from literature, film, documentary, the visual arts, as well as theoretical and discursive documents. We will also address different genres of literature such as fiction, drama, and poetry.