350:659                                                                                              

Index # - 52883

Distribution Requirement:  B, C

Tuesday – 1:10 p.m.   

MU 001  

David Eng

Seminar:  Trauma and Witnessing in Modern China

This seminar has two purposes.  First, it will provide a broad introduction to major psychoanalytic texts on trauma.  Second, it will consider how to apply these theories in the context of China, a nation-state whose modern history might be described as a series of unending revolutions and upheavals.  In this second part of the course, we will read a number of literary texts and memoirs, as well as screen a number of Chinese films, as “testimonies” to historical events that cannot be approached head-on but can only be apprehending through the oblique narratives of its witnesses and survivors.  In this regard, this seminar is also a theoretical exploration of the complex relationship between literary/cinematic representation and historiography.  Some of the key events in modern Chinese history that we will examine include the Opium War (1839-1842), the Republican Revolution (1911), the Nanking Massacre (1937), the Communist Revolution (1949), the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and Tiananmen (1989).

Required texts:

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996)

Cathy Caruth, ed.  Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)

Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997)

Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (New York: Anchor Books, 1992)

Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai (New York: Grove Press, 1987)

Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)

David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds.  Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961)

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 243-258.

Sigmund Freud, “Reflections upon War and Death” (1915), Character and Culture, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 107-133.

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)

Ha Jin, The Crazed (New York: Pantheon, 1992)

Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000)

Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Anchee Min, Red Azalea (New York: Pantheon, 1994)

Films:

Bernardo Bertolucci, The Last Emperor

Chen Kaige, Farewell my Concubine

Mabel Cheung, The Soong Sisters

Stanley Kwan, Lan Yu