Term paper, no fewer than 10 pages in length, is worth 22% of the course grade. The most important quality of this paper is your own voice as a critic sharing your views on issues elaborated in the works we study. Begin it by no later than the seventh week with a short paragraph identifying what I hope to be your take on life in general:
- China reinventing its modern history by reappropriating the progressive narrative of the West
- womanhood, manhood, nationhood, personhood as make-shift definitions of of Chinese-ness
- literary characters as our own fragmented selves ambivalent about the progressive agendas of the state
- modern China as a testing ground of social democracy for all conscious of themselves as a free people
- films, novels, and histories as creative spaces or languages for self representation and self-reinvention
- modernity as a myth for the individual to achieve a sense of belonging, for the finite to lose itself in the infinite
Once you identify your point of entry into this body of texts, I’ll walk with you through some of the works in which your preoccupation is already addressed to some extent. You then elaborate your views by discussing the ideas and issues found in these stories.