Chinese (CHINESE)

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
The course is designed for students who are of non-Chinese origin and were not raised in a Chinese-speaking environment; or who are of Chinese origin but do not speak Chinese and whose parents do not speak Chinese. The course develops beginning learners’ functional language ability—the ability to use Mandarin Chinese in linguistically and culturally appropriate ways at the beginning level. It helps students acquire communicative competence in Chinese while sensitizing them to the links between language and culture.
Elementary Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Chinese 1B (5 units) is designed for students who have successfully completed Chinese 1A or the equivalent. A good command of the Chinese phonetic system (pinyin) and knowledge of 300-400 Chinese characters are the prerequisites for this class. The class will continue to focus on training students in the four language skills-- listening, speaking, reading, and writing with a gradually increasing emphasis on translingual and transcultural competence. By the end of this semester, you are expected to reach the proficiency levels of intermediate low in the listening, speaking, reading, and writing four areas stated in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines.
Elementary Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
This course is designed specifically for Mandarin heritage students who possess speaking skill but little or no reading and writing skills in Chinese. The course utilizes students’ prior knowledge of listening and speaking skills to advance them to the intermediate Chinese proficiency level in one semester. Close attention is paid to meeting Mandarin heritage students’ literacy needs in meaningful contexts while introducing a functional vocabulary and a systematic review of structures through culturally related topics. The Hanyu Pinyin (a Chinese Romanization system) and traditional/simplified characters are introduced.
Accelerated Elementary Chinese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
The course is designed for students who have had exposure to a non-Mandarin Chinese dialect but cannot speak Mandarin and possess little or no reading and writing skills in Chinese. The course helps students gain a fundamental knowledge about Mandarin Chinese and explore their Chinese heritage culture through language. Students learn ways and discourse strategies to express themselves and develop their linguistic and cultural awareness in order to function appropriately in Mandarin-speaking environments.
Elementary Chinese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Elementary Cantonese 3A is designed for non-heritage learners with no prior knowledge of Cantonese, a regional variety of Chinese, introducing students to its use through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. Topics include meeting people, shopping, leisure activities, telling the time, discussing daily routines, describing people and family members, and transportation, and students will compose texts in Cantonese that show the relationship between language and culture. Finally, the course develops students’ awareness of socio-culturally situated language use and their ability to compare and negotiate similarities and differences between the target culture and their own culture.
Elementary Cantonese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Elementary Cantonese 3B is designed for non-heritage learners who have successfully completed 3A or equivalent. The course encourages students to construct meanings in oral, written and visual texts related to daily life topics such as locating things and places, food and clothing, weather, giving advice, telephone conversations, and arranging meetings, and to compose such texts. The course continues to develop students’ ability to understand the relationship between language and culture and to develop students’ awareness as to how social and cultural situations affect language use, encouraging students to explore multiple meanings and better understand the nature of their interpretations based on their attitudes, belief, and experiences.
Elementary Cantonese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Elementary Cantonese for Heritage Speakers 3X is designed for native and heritage Mandarin speakers. These students share the knowledge of standard Chinese writing system with Cantonese speakers. They have an interest in speaking Cantonese and learning a Chinese subculture shared among Cantonese speakers. This course will introduce students to its use through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. Topics include meeting people, shopping, leisure activities, telling the time, discussing daily routines, describing people and family members, transportation, and students will compose texts in Cantonese. Students will focus on vocabulary, linguistic knowledge, culture through expression analysis, and practical use of language.
Elementary Cantonese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024
Elementary Taiwanese–Language, Culture, and Society in Taiwan (Chinese 4A) is designed to allow learners with no prior knowledge of the Chinese language to build familiarity with Taiwanese (or Southern Min), a variety of Chinese, through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. This is the first part of a two-semester sequence designed to equip students with the basic language skills needed in everyday life situations. There are no prerequisites for this course. The course uses various authentic materials and adopts a communicative approach to develop students’ awareness of socio-culturally situated language use and ability to compare and negotiate similarities and differences between the target culture and their own culture.
Elementary Taiwanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025
Elementary Taiwanese (Chinese 4B) is the second semester of a one-year sequence designed to allow learners with no prior knowledge of Chinese language to build familiarity with Taiwanese (or Southern Min), a regional variety of Chinese, through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. This two-semester sequence is designed to equip students with the basic language skills needed in everyday life situations. The course aims to develop students’ awareness of socio-culturally situated language use along with their ability to compare and negotiate similarities and differences between the target culture and their own culture. Prerequisite: Chinese 4A or permission of instructor
Elementary Taiwanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
The first in a two-semester sequence, introducing students to Chinese literature in translation. In addition to literary sources, a wide range of philosophical and historical texts will be covered, as well as aspects of visual and material culture. 7A covers early China through late medieval China, up to and including the Yuan Dynasty (14th century); the course will also focus on the development of sound writing.
Introduction to Premodern Chinese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The second of a two-semester sequence introducing students to Chinese literature in translation. In addition to literary sources, a wide range of philosophical and historical texts will be covered, as well as aspects of visual and material culture. 7B focuses on late imperial, modern, and contemporary China. The course will focus on the development of sound writing skills.
Introduction to Modern Chinese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
The course is designed for students who are of non-Chinese origin and were not raised in a Chinese-speaking environment, or who are of Chinese origin but do not speak Chinese and whose parents do not speak Chinese. The course deals with lengthy conversations as well as narrative and descriptive texts in both simplified and traditional characters. It helps students to express themselves in speaking and writing on a range of topics and raises their awareness of the connection between language and culture to foster the development of communicative competence.
Intermediate Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The course further develops students’ linguistic and cultural competence. In dealing with texts, students are guided to interpret, narrate, describe, and discuss topics ranging from real-life experience and personal memoire to historic events. Intercultural competence is promoted through linguistic and cultural awareness and language use in culturally appropriate contexts.
Intermediate Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
The course continues to develop students’ literacy and communicative competence through vocabulary and structure expansion dealing with topics related to Chinese heritage students’ personal experiences. Students are guided to express themselves on complex issues and to connect their language knowledge with real world experiences.
Accelerated Intermediate Chinese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Going beyond satisfying basic communicative needs, students would learn to use Cantonese to complete more complicated tasks such as elaborating, comparing, analyzing, defending, debating, etc. Students would be frequently exposed to discussions regarding broader societal issues such as housing, food culture, fashion, safety, recreation, education, etc. Assuming basic competence of Cantonese, the course attempts to relate the learners to Chinese subculture through analyzing the link between Cantonese expressions and societal phenomenon in the Cantonese speaking society. Difference between Cantonese and Mandarin expressions and its cultural implications, as well as the social position of Cantonese globally and regionally.
Intermediate Cantonese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2020
This course examines the complex worldviews of China’s Han period, the centuries that follow its unification and the establishment of its empire. The momentous changes of this period shaped traditional and contemporary views of history and society, philosophy, and religion, and as a result are still relevant today. This course will look at Han “thought,” a word chosen for its range, including religion, state ritual, social conventions, moral philosophy, and thinking about the natural world. It covers both elite and popular culture, and pays particular attention to two works of the second century B.C.E.: the Shiji (i.e., Records of the Historian) or the Huainanzi.
Chinese Thought in the Han Dynasty: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
The course takes students to a higher level of competence in Chinese language and culture and develops students’ critical linguistic and cultural awareness. It surveys social issues and values on more abstract topics in a changing China. Through the development of discourse and cultural knowledge in spoken and written Chinese, students learn to interpret subtle textual meanings in texts and contexts as well as reflect on the world and themselves and express themselves using a variety of genres.
Advanced Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The course continues the development of critical awareness by emphasizing the link between socio-cultural literacy and a higher level of language competence. While continuing to expand their critical literacy skills, students interpret texts related to Chinese popular culture, social change, cultural traditions, politics and history. Through linguistic and cultural comparisons, students understand more about people in the target society and themselves as well as about the power of language in language use to enhance their competence in operating between languages and associated cultures.
Advanced Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This course advances students’ linguistic and cultural competence through the development of critical literacy skills. It guides students to become more sophisticated language users equipped with linguistic, pragmatic, and textual knowledge in discussions, reading, writing, and translation. Students reflect on the world and themselves through the lens of the target language and culture and become more competent in operating between English and Chinese and between American culture and Chinese culture. Students learn to recognize a second version of Chinese characters.
Advanced Chinese for Heritage Learners: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Advanced Chinese 100XB is designed for Chinese heritage language learners who have taken Chinese 100XA or an equivalent level of Chinese. It further develops students’ linguistic and intercultural competence through working with texts that deal with cross-strait relations, Chinese people’s style of living, their changing lifestyles and mindsets as well as with migrant workers who have been deeply involved in the economic reforms that have taken place in mainland China. The texts also include a survey of China’s modernization in its early modern times and as well three historical figures from this period.
Advanced Chinese for Heritage Learners: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The course is designed to assist students to reach the advanced-mid level on language skills and to enhance their intercultural competence. Students read the works of famous Chinese writers. Movie adaptations of these writings are also used. In addition to reading and seeking out information, students experience readings by interpreting and constructing meanings and evaluate the effect of the language form choice.
Fourth-Year Chinese Readings: Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
The course is designed to further develop students’ advanced-mid level language proficiency and intercultural competence. It uses authentic readings on Chinese social, political, and journalistic issues, supplemented by newspaper articles. To develop students’ self-learning abilities and help them to link the target language to their real world experience, students’ agency in learning is promoted through critical reading and rewriting and through comparing linguistic and cultural differences.
Fourth-Year Chinese Readings: Social Sciences and History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
The first half of a one-year introductory course in literary Chinese, introducing key features of grammar, syntax, and usage, along with the intensive study of a set of readings in the language. Readings are drawn from a variety of pre-Han and Han-Dynasty sources.
Introduction to Literary Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The second half of a one-year introductory course in literary Chinese, continuing the topics from the first semester, and giving basic coverage of relevant issues in the history of the language and writing system. The use of basic reference sources is introduced.
Introduction to Literary Chinese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This fast-paced course improves students’ abilities to use advanced language forms to read and discuss a wide range of abstract subjects and issues. This includes literature, philosophy, law, economics, history, cross-Strait relations, geography, and movie criticism. The course also develops students’ ability to read articles that contain both formal and informal and modern and classic Chinese usages. Students learn to identify and explain the classical Chinese allusions used in the articles and compare them to their modern counterparts. Students use the Chinese language in their fields of study and are directed to write a professional paper in their academic field.
Fifth-Year Readings: Reading and Analysis of Advanced Chinese Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2019
This course is an introduction to the history of Buddhism in China from its beginnings in the early centuries CE to the present day. Through engagement with historical scholarship, primary sources in translation, and Chinese Buddhist art, we will explore the intellectual history and cultural impact of Buddhism in China. Students will also be introduced to major issues in the institutional history of Buddhism, the interactions between Buddhism and indigenous Chinese religions, and the relationship between Buddhism and the state. Previous study of Buddhism is helpful but not required.
Buddhism in China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2020
Modern Chinese Buddhism emerged from a variety of reactions to the challenges posed by modernity. The course aims at introducing students to the ways in which Buddhists in China have engaged and continue to engage with a modern society and a globalized world. The course will follow the trends of Chinese Buddhism from the early twentieth century down to the most recent developments in the present. In exploring modern constructions of Buddhism in China, we will distinguish between modernism and modernity, and investigate how Chinese Buddhists introduced reforms and innovations, while also attempting to maintain continuity with traditional ideals and modes of practice.
Buddhism in Modern China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2012, Fall 2006, Fall 2004
Readings in historical, religious, and philosophical texts of the Zhou, Han, and later periods from both printed and manuscript sources.
Ancient Chinese Prose: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2014, Fall 2007
Readings from the Shijing (book of Odes), the Chuci (song of Chu), and selections from other early compilations of poetry.
Ancient Chinese Poetry: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Fall 2016, Spring 2015
Readings in printed and manuscript sources that relate to early Chinese popular religion, the Celestial Masters tradition, medieval Daoist revelations (e.g., Shangqing and Lingbao texts), Daoism and the state, interactions with other traditions, liturgy, alchemy, drama, and modern Daoist practices in China and the diaspora.
Topics in Daoism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 Second 6 Week Session
Introduction to the forms and subtypes of classical poetry, focusing on both learning to read poems in the original as well as developing the critical and analytical tools to discuss and respond to them in an informed way.
Readings in Classical Chinese Poetry: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2013, Spring 2013
Thematic focus and range of readings will vary. The course will deal with readings from one or more genres of classical Chinese prose, such as essays, epigraphical materials, historical works, classical tales, administrative documents, scholars' notes, geographical treatises, or travel diaries.
Readings in Medieval Prose: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Spring 2016
This course is an introduction to the study of medieval Buddhist literature written in classical Chinese. We will read samples from a variety of genres, including early Chinese translations of Sanskrit and Central Asian Buddhist scriptures, indigenous Chinese commentaries, philosophical treatises, and sectarian works, including Chan (Zen koans). The course will also serve as an introduction to resource materials used in the study of Chinese Buddhist texts, and students will be expected to make use of a variety of reference tools in preparation for class. Readings in Chinese will be supplemented by a range of secondary readings in English on Mahayana doctrine and Chinese Buddhist history.
Readings in Chinese Buddhist Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2020
This course is an intensive introduction to Taiwanese literature and media culture.
Reading Taiwan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2019
A critical study of pre-modern Chinese fiction.
Readings in Vernacular Chinese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2019
This course will introduce students to selected works of modern Chinese literature produced in the first half of the 20th century, as well as their cultural and historical context. How did writers such as Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, and others attempt to make themselves "at home" in a world profoundly dislocated by the forces of colonialism, war, and revolution? We will examine the politics of literary style, questions of nationalism, representations of gender, and the problem of colonial modernity in these texts. All primary texts are presented in the original Chinese, supplemented by critical and biographical articles in English.
Modern Chinese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2018, Fall 2014
This course explores popular, realist, and avant-garde literature from mainland China and Taiwan since 1949. We will consider how writers have engaged with the cultural dislocations of modernity by exploring questions such as the presentation of cultural and gender identities and the politics of memory and place. Central to our discussion will be the problem of how literature not only reflects but also critically engages with historical and cultural experience through a variety of genres. A crucial aspect of this course will be the development of skills in close, critical, and historically contextualized reading.
Contemporary Chinese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2017, Fall 2015
Chinese cities are the sites of complicated global/local interconnections as the nation is increasingly incorporated into the world system. Understanding Chinese cities is the key to analyzing the dramatic transformation of Chinese society and culture. This course is designed to teach students to think about Chinese cities in more textured ways. How are urban forms and urban spaces produced through processes of social, political, and ideological conflict? How are cities represented in literary, cinematic, and various popular cultures? How has our imagination of the city been shaped and how are these spatial discourses influencing the making of the cities of tomorrow?
Reading Chinese Cities: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2009, Fall 2005
This course explores one of the most central and potent areas of cultural politics in modern China: the city and its relations to the countryside. We will explore how urban space and native soil became central places of imagination and desire in modernity; how Beijing and Shanghai become mediums of imagining differing meanings of "modernity" and "tradition," "Chinese" and "Western," and cultural authenticity; the repeated reformist and revolutionary desire to return from the city back to the countryside; as well as more recent mass migrations from the countryside during a time of (and as part of) drastic urban destruction and "renewal."
Cities and the Country: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2011, Spring 2010, Spring 2007
Chinese dialects, Mandarin phonology, and Mandarin grammar.
Structure of the Chinese Language: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2009, Spring 2008, Spring 2001
Writing system, early dictionaries, historical phonology, and classical grammar.
History of the Chinese Language: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2020
This course introduces Chinese language cinema since the late 1970s. Depending on the semester, the class will either focus on the distinct new waves in the three regions of Mainland, Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or cover all three regions to examine to what extent these “New Cinemas” share similar concerns on questions of gender, politics, remembrance, and urbanization.
Contemporary Chinese Language Cinema: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020, Spring 2014
Ideals of good governance are a core concern of many brands of traditional Chinese thought. The image of the ruler whose authority is exercised in harmony with the desires and interests of the society at large plays a key role not only in theories of governance but also in thought about ethics and psychology. There is also a fascination with the bad ruler. In addition to serving as negative examples just as good rulers serve as positive examples, bad rulers also provide an imaginative space for thinking about extremes of human will, offering an outlet for fantasy and vicarious gratification of desires that normally remain taboo.
Bad Emperors: Fantasies of Sovereignty and Transgression in the Chinese Tradition: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2015
This course introduces the history of traditional Chinese drama from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, covering important works from a wide range of genres (farcical, religious, detective, martial arts, historical, and romantic). We study Chinese theater in the context of pleasure precincts, ad hoc markets, ritual parades, and printed matter. The underlying questions we ask are: how did different kinds of spatial structure historically define performance? And how did these varied spatial configurations orient the relationship of the audience to the performance differently? And what general implications did the theatrical space have for the constitution of the self and for social formation in medieval and early modern China?
Traditional Chinese Drama: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2022
Vernacular fiction in late imperial China emerged at the margins of official historiography, traveled through oral storytelling, and reached sophistication in the hands of literati. Covering the major genres and masterpieces of traditional Chinese novels including military, martial arts, libertine, and romantic stories, this course investigates how shifting boundaries brought about significant transformations of Chinese narrative at the levels of both form and content.
Exploring Premodern Chinese Novels: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022, Spring 2020
This course centers around intensive reading and analysis of Cao Xueqin’s 18th-century masterpiece of Chinese fiction (also known as the Dream of the Red Chamber). Students will be introduced to the literary, cultural, philosophical, and material world from which this work emerged, as well as various approaches to the world within the text.
The Story of the Stone: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2021
This course examines the development of Confucianism in pre-modern China using a dialogical model that emphasizes its interactions with competing viewpoints. Particular attention will be paid to ritual, conceptions of human nature, ethics, and to the way that varieties of Confucianism were rooted in more general theories of value.
Confucius and His Interpreters: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course is an intensive introduction in English translation to the history, literature, and media culture of Taiwan.
Literature and Media Culture in Taiwan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021
This course is an introduction to media culture in 20th-century China, with an emphasis on photography, cinema, and popular music. The course places these productions in historical and cultural context, examining the complex intertwinement of culture, technology, and politics in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan from the turn of the last century to the beginning of the 21st. Students will also be introduced to a number of approaches to thinking about and analyzing popular cultural phenomena.
Popular Media in Modern China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Spring 2010, Fall 2008
What do landscapes "do"? How do landscape images and travel narratives mediate experiences of land, nature, and other peoples? How do landscapes map one's place in the world, shaping both cultural identities and real geographic spaces? Can landscapes travel? This course explores such questions by examining one of the world's longest-running traditions of landscape representation. We will consider such landscape genres as poetry, prose description, fiction, travel narrative, maps, painting, and photography, and consider their work across China's long history of imperial expansion, colonization, and globalization. We will also consider China's places in thinking about landscape and travel in the West.
Chinese Landscapes: Space, Place, and Travel: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in East Asian Languages (for description of Honors Program, see Index).
Honors Course: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2018, Fall 2015
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in East Asian Languages (for description of Honors Program, see Index).
Honors Course: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2019, Fall 2018
Readings vary from year to year and are drawn from a wide variety of philosophical and historiographical sources.
Seminar in Philological Analysis of Ancient Chinese Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2019
This course sets out to examine a set of “focus chapters” from the Zhuangzi along several dimensions: 1) in the context of Warring States thought, 2) as independent stories that need to be puzzled through and read critically, and 3) tracing the influence of those chapters on subsequent periods of Chinese thought.
Reading the Zhuangzi: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2017, Fall 2016
An analytical exploration of the central texts of Warring States (453-221 BCE) religion and philosophy.
Early Chinese Thought: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
This seminar is an intensive introduction to various genres of Buddhist literature in classical Chinese, including translations of Sanskrit and Central Asian scriptures. Chinese commentaries, philosophical treatises, hagiographies, and sectarian works. It is intended for graduate students who already have some facility in classical Chinese. It will also serve as a tools and methods course, covering the basic reference works and secondary scholarship in the field of East Asian Buddhism. The content of the course will be adjusted from semester to semester to best accommodate the needs and interests of students.
Readings in Chinese Buddhist Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2011, Spring 2008
Readings in major genres and authors of Chinese literature, with attention to relevant "nonliterary" (philosophical, scholarly, historiographical, etc.) sources where useful; period and thematic focus varies from semester to semester.
Seminar in Chinese Literary History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
Course content varies with interests of students.
Texts on the Civilization of Medieval China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Introduction to the history of Chinese textual production. Detailed close reading of the texts and training in the methodologies of solving problems of lexicon, theme, structure, imagery, and metaphor.
Genre and Method in Traditional Chinese Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2021, Fall 2017
This course explores relations of Chinese literature and culture to other parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, or the West, ranging from specific global transactions to comparative perspectives, and ranging widely across different historical periods. Specific topics vary from year to year.
Chinese Literatures and Cultures in Global Context: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
This course examines the canonical texts of the late-imperial period, placing them in the context of literary culture of the Ming-Qing. The course focuses on a different set of texts each time it is taught; the aim is to introduce students to the primary issues in scholarship of late-imperial fiction and drama over a period of several years.
Late Imperial Fiction and Drama: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2019, Spring 2015
Graduate seminar in modern Chinese literature. Topics vary from year to year.
Modern Chinese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2016, Fall 2014
Directed study of modern Chinese literary and media cultures. Course provides both historical coverage and a grounding in various theoretical problems and methodological approaches. Topics include print culture, cinema, popular music, and material culture; emphasis varies from year to year.
Modern Chinese Cultural Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Spring 2020
Directed study of modern Chinese film. Emphasis varies from year to year.
Modern Chinese Film Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Special tutorial or seminar on selected topics not covered by available courses or seminars.
Directed Study for Graduate Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015

Thesis Preparation and Related Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
Individual study for the comprehensive or language requirements in consultation with the graduate adviser. Units may not be used to meet either unit or residence requirements for a master's degree.
Individual Study for Master's Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
Individual study in consultation with the major field adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare for various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D.
Individual Study for Doctoral Students: Read More [+]