Chinese5040Spring2004

Chinese 5040, Spring 2008, Readings in Chinese Text: Modern Chinese Literary Writings

Prerequisite: Chinese 4042 or equivalent or instructor consent

Instructor: Zou, Zhen

Beginning from fall 2007, the contents of the Chinese 5040 course has become 5xxx level courses in the real sense of the word. It includes mostly modern and contemporary Chinese literary works.

Among modern Chinese thinkers, Lu Xun is the most critical of traditional Chinese system and culture, and is the most representative intellectual in pushing China into modernity. Naturally, reading Lu Xun is critical in understanding China’s New Cultural Movement in the early twentieth-century, a great challenge for many Western sinologists. Therefore, in the Spring semester of 2008, we will study articles, short stories, and novelettes by Lu Xun. If you can understand Lu Xun, you will have a good understanding of traditional and modern Chinese society and culture, as well as Chinese intellectuals’ urgent sense of pushing China into the modern world. It will also help you greatly in understanding other important writers of the New Cultural Movement. The works we will study in this semester includes Lu Xun’s insights in Chinese people’s characteristics, the problems of the institution, oppression of the female, and the cause of China’s backwardness. Class discussion will focus on the use of the language, the social interpretation of the texts, and the Chinese cultural and philosophical messages found in those works. The course will be taught in standard modern Chinese (Mandarin).
Class time: 65% Discussion, 30% Lecture, 5% Lab and video.
Work load: 10-20 Pages of reading per week, 6 pages of writing per semester, 2 exams, reading presentation, and a final essay.
Grade: 20% midterm exam, 20% final exam, 10% reading presentation, 15% quizzes, 15% class participation, 20% final essay.
Exam format: Short answers and essay questions.
Course URL: http://www.all.umn.edu/chinese_language

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