Syllabus

WEEKLY READING SCHEDULE

Note: please keep an eye on the online syllabus as it will be modified slightly over the course of the semester. Books and anthologies from which chapters and essays have been copied for e-reserves also are available in hard copy on main reserve.

INTRODUCTION: TERMS OF THE COURSE: The Body Invisible?

Week One : Perspectives on the Body
Sept 2 - (Tu): Introduction to Critical Issues

  • Eleanor Heartney, "Zhang Huan: Becoming the Body" (essay available on the artist's website; for access click here)
  • We will return to Zhang Huan later in the semester to discuss his work in greater depth, but for now, if you'd like to get a sense of who he is as an artist, I would recommend reading his wide-ranging interview with Michele Robecchi (optional reading, available on the artist's website; for access click here)
  • images: Zhang Huan, "Shanghai Family Tree" (2001 performance and photographs); "Family Tree" (2000 performance and photographs); "Chickenpox" (2000 performance and photographs, New York)

Sept 4 - (Th): What is a "Chinese body?"

PART ONE : LATE IMPERIAL CHINA (the final decades of the Qing dynasty, 1644-1911)

Week Two: Writing Bodies
Sept 9- (Tu) : Calligraphy and Phenomenology (be sure to check the blog for questions that might help you navigate the readings; I will post them by Sunday at 5 pm).

  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Experience and objective thought. The problem of the body," in Phenomenology of Perception, trans. from the French by Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: The Humanities Press, 1962), 67-72. (e-reserve)
  • Charles Lachman, "'The Image Made by Chance' in China and the West: Ink Wang Meets Jackson Pollock's Mother," The Art Bulletin 74, no. 3 (September 1992): 499-510 JSTOR
  • images: 19th-century calligraphy

Sept 11- (Th) : Body Language

  • Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits 1600-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),127-130. (e-reserve)
  • Mieke Bal, "Reading Art?" in The Mieke Bal Reader (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 289-312. (e-reserve)
  • image: Ren Xiong's Self Portrait

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Week Three: Colonial Bodies
Sept 16- (Tu):  Domesticating the Orient: Images of Women
discussion facilitators: Sat , Norah, Anna

  • Sander Gilman, "The Prostitute and the Hottentot Venus," In Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 76-108. (e-reserve)
  • Linda Nochlin, "The Imaginary Orient," in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-century art and society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 33-59. (e-reserves).(for color images in the chapter, click here)
  • images: Eduoard Manet's Olympia (1863)

Sept 18 - (Th): "Sick Man of the East:" Diseased Bodies
discussion facilitators: Kelsey, Erika, Kelly

  • Larissa Heinrich, "Handmaids to the Gospel:   Lam Qua's Medical Portraiture," in Tokens of Exchange:   The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, ed. Lydia Liu, (Durham and London:   Duke University Press, 1999), 239-75. (e-reserve)
  • Barbara Stafford, "Marking," in Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 281-339. (e-reserve)
  • images: Lam Qua's medical portraiture
  • for those of you who are curious, Sander Gilman recently (just this month) reviewed Larissa Heinrich's new book The Afterlife of Images (the article in Tokens of Exchange is one chapter in the book). You can read it by clicking here. An optional reading, of course.

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Week Four: New Technologies of Vision
MONDAY Sept 22 5:00 Eliot 314 please plan to attend lecture by
Yingjin Zhang, Professor of Modern Comparative Literature, University of California, San Diego

Sept 23 - (Tu):  The Chinese Body Between Film and Print Culture
Yingjin Zhang, guest

  • Yingjin Zhang, "Prostitution and Urban Imagination: Negotiating the Public and the Private in Chinese Films of the 1930s," in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford U Press, 1999), 160-80. (e-reserves)
  • Yingjin Zhang, "The Texture of the Metropolis: Modernist Inscription of Shanghai
    in the 1930s," in China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford U Press, 1998), 173-87. (e-reserves)

Sept 25 - (Th):   Through the Camera Lens
discussion facilitators: Blake, Jazia, Natalie P

  • Yingjin Zhang, "Artwork, Commodity, Event: Representations of the Female Body in Modern Chinese Pictorials," in Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s, ed. Jason Kuo (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2007), 121-161. (e-reserve)
  • Roberta Wue, "Essentially Chinese: The Chinese Portrait Subject in Nineteenth-Century Photography." In Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture. Eds. Wu Hung and Katherine Tsang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. (e-reserve)
  • images: Heinz von Perckhammer, Edle Nackheit in China and photographs published in The Good Companion (Liangyou) . See also slide show of photographic nudes by von Perckhammer in Thomas Hahn's website (click here)

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Week Five: Wearing the Body
Sept 30- (Tu):   Seeing Through Clothes
discussion facilitators: Zoe, Lindsey, Kim

  • John Zou, "Cross-Dressed Nation: Mei Lanfang and the Clothing of Modern Chinese Men," in Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, eds Larissa Heinrich and Fran Martin (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 79-97. (e-reserve)
  • Ann Hollander,   Seeing Through Clothes ( Berkeley:   University of California Press, 1978),  Chapter 5, "Dress." (e-reserve)
  • images: photographs of Mei Lanfang; to see performance of Mei Lanfang on Youtube, click here
Oct 2 - (Th):  Visual Pleasure and the Body: Advertising Posters and the movie The Goddess
  • Linda Mulvey's two articles, the second a response to problematizing the male gaze that Mulvey takes up in her first, classic essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." (click here)
  • Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Macmillan, 1963), ch. 15 "Fetishism" (1927), 214-219. (e-reserve)
  • formulation of research project question due; this weekend sign up for small-group "tutorials" during week 6 to brainstorm research projects, sign-up sheets on Lisa's office door NOTE: Please POST YOUR PROPOSAL AND PICTURE TO THE BLOG SO THAT MEMBERS OF YOUR GROUP CAN READ THEM BEFORE MEETING WITH YOU

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PART TWO. SOCIALIST CHINA (1949-1976)

Week Six: Political Bodies
Oct 7- (Tu): Obediant Bodies

  • Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1977), "Docile Bodies," pp 135-169 (text on main reserve).
  • Please investigate the Asia Society homepage, which features a number of videos and links to important sources on the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) in conjunction with the show it is currently hosting (The exhibition catalog is not yet available).
  • images: "Morning Sun" (Carma Hinton)

Oct 9 - (Th): Mao and the Pantoptic Gaze
discussion facilitators: Jamie, Mariel, Marcia, Lara

  • Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1977), 195-228. (e-reserve)
  • Wu Hung, "Face of Authority: Tiananmen and Mao's Tiananmen Portrait," in Remaking Beijing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 51-84 (e-reserve)
  • images: Tiananmen Square

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Week Seven:Engendering the Revolution
Oct 14 - (Tu): The Cultural Revolution
discussion facilitators: Natalie U , Stephanie, Ella

  • Emily Honig, "Maoist Mappings of Gender: Reassessing the Red Guards," in Chinese Femininites/Chinese Masculinities, eds. Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N Wasserstrom (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), 255-268. (e-reserve)
  • Judith Butler, "Prohibition, Psychoanalysis and the Heterosexual Matrix," in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London and New York:   Routledge, 1998), 423-27. (main reserve)
  • Judith Butler, "Excerpt from 'Introduction' to Bodies That Matter" in The Gender and Sexuality Reader, eds. Roger Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 531-542 (main reserve)
  • images: depictions of women in cultural revolution posters

Oct 16 - (Th):  Olympian Ideals
discussion faciliators: Yoseff, Lauren, Mariel

  • Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 213-237. (e-reserve)
  • Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, first chapter on the culmination of separation (click here) Consider especially how Debord is theorizing power.
  • images: 2008 Olympics website, NBC coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony (08.08.08)

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Oct 18-26 Fall Break

PART THREE. POST-MAO CHINA (1976-today)

Week Eight: Performing the Body
Oct 28- (Tu): Body as Political Site
discussion facilitators: Jamie, Erika, Kelsey

  • Thomas Berghuis, Performance Art in China (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2006), ch. 3. (main reserve)
  • Peggy Phelan, "The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction," in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 146-66. (e-reserve)

Oct 30 - (Th):  Body Experiments
discussion faciliators: Natalie P, Jazia, Blake

  • Thomas Berghuis, Performance Art in China (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2006), ch. 4. (main reserve)
  • explore Zhang Huan's website http://www.zhanghuan.com
  • images: Zhang Huan videos

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Week Nine: Simulated Bodies
Nov 4 - (Tu):  Hyperreal Bodies
discussion faciliators: Lauren, Sat , Stefanie

  • Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181 (e-reserve)
  • "Realities and Other Absurdities:   A Conversation with Cao Fei," interview by Joni Low with translation assistance by Stephen Tong, Yishu (December 2006):   73-81.   (e-reserve)
  • Maya Kovskaya, "Heroes of the Mundane:   The Syncretic Imagination of Cao Fei," Yishu (December 2006):   82-85. (e-reserves)
  • Objects/images to study: Cao Fei's website http://www.caofei.com Please look carefully at her cos-play images (under works, photography)

November 5 - Wednesday, 5 pm special lecture by my friend and colleague Yomi Braester, Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Program in Cinema Studies, University of Washington: "Architectural Modeling in China: Art, Commerce, and Politics." Psych 105. Please plan to attend


Nov 6 - (Th): Video Games/Digital Media
Yomi Braester, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Washington, guest

  • Thomas Berghuis, Performance Art in China (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2006), ch. 5. (main reserve)
  • redraft of research proposal with annotated bibliography due on TUESDAY new due date!

Week Ten: Marking the Body
Nov 11 - (Tu):   Injured and Distorted Bodies
discussion faciliators: Anna, Kelly, Natalie U

  • Thomas Berghuis, Performance Art in China (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2006), ch. 6. (main reserve)
  • Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp 3-19 of introduction and chapter 3 "Pain and Imagining," pp. 161-80. (main reserve)
  • images: Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Gallery and University of Chicago, 2000), case studies: Post-Sense Sensibility: Distorted Bodies and Delusion (164-171); Infatuated with Injury: Open Studio Exhibition No. 2 (204-208). (e-reserve)
  • redraft of project proposal with annotated bibliography due

Nov 13 - (Th):  "Grotesque" Bodies
discussion faciliators: Stefanie, Norah, Stephanie

  • Mikhail Bahktin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968). (main reserve) pages 303 to top paragraph of 325
  • videos by the following artists (discussion facilitators will select the artists whose work will be discussed in conference) available online at http://www.freewaves.org/archive.php (look under ARCHIVES for links to their work).

    Chuang Wen-Yao
    Cui Xiuwen
    Jiang Zhi
    Liu Wei
    Ma Yongfeng
    Qiu Zhijie
    Wang Gongxin
    Wang Jianwei
    Yang Zhenzhong
    Zhou Xiahu

Week Eleven: Bodies in Global Economies of Things and Beauty
Nov 18 - (Tu): The Nymph of the Luo River Revisited: Chinese Feminist Art in a Global Context (a consideration of what it means to make feminist art within a culture that increasingly finds ideal feminine bodies to be foreign bodies)
discussion faciliators: Ella, Kim, Marcia, Lara

  • Louisa Schein, "The Consumption of Color and the Politics of White Skin in Post-Mao China," in The Gender and Sexuality Reader, eds. Roger Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 473-486. (main reserve)
  • New York Times article (July 30, 2008): "China's Female Artists Emerge Quietly" see also slide shows linked to this article
  • Liao, Wen. "Tumultuous History of China's Feminist Values and Art." china-art.com (PDF)
  • Erickson, Britta.   "The Rise of a Feminist Spirit in Contemporary Chinese Art." Art Asia Pacific (July 2001). (PDF)
  • interview with Lin Tianmiao from catalog Lin Tianmiao: Non Zero (Beijing: Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, 2004), PDF

Nov 20 - (Thu): The Corporate Machine

  • Edward Burtynsky's work in Manufactured Landscapes (DVD to be screened in conference)
  • Emily Martin, "The End of the Body?" In The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy, Roger Lancaster and Michaela di Leonardo, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1997). (main reserve)
  • excerpt on Cao Fei's installation in a Siemans factory from The Real Thing (PDF)
  • images: Yang Fudong, Hong Hao, Cao Fei, Wang Jianwei's video SPIDER

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Weeks Twelve and Thirteen. Urban Bodies
Nov 25 (Tu) The Shanghai World Expo 2010: Revisiting the Miniature and the Gigantic

  • Susan Stewart, On Longing, chapter on the miniature
  • Thomas Campanella, "Reclaiming Shanghai," in The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World (New York: Princeton Archietcural Press, 2008), 56-91. (e-reserves)
  • images: Xing Danwen's Urban Fiction at the artist's website, Zhan Wang's sculpture

THANKSIVING BREAK NOVEMBER 27-30

Week Thirteen. More Urban Bodies
Dec 02 - (Th):   Portraits of the Urban Generation
discussion facilitators: Yoseff, Lindsey, Zoe

  • Michael Dutton, "Street Scenes of Subalternity: China, Globalization, Rights," Social Text 60 (Autumn 1999): 63-86. This is a somewhat dated text having to do with street life in Chinese cities, but it presents what I believe to be a fairly accurate political reading of problems still confronting the new "urban generation," and one of its interests is in the fate of the post-socialist body (PDF)
  • images: Wu Hung, "It's Me: A Case Study," in Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 2000), 85-133 and 162-63 (e-reserve).

Dec 04- (Tu):  Rewriting the Body in the "Glocal" City of Hong Kong: Graffiti

  • David Clarke, "The Culture of a Border Within:   Hong Kong Art and China," Art Journal 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000):   80-101. (JSTOR)
  • Roland Barthes, "Non Multa Sed Multum," in Cy Twombly : fifty years of works on paper, curated by Julie Sylvester with essays by Simon Schama and Roland Barthes (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2004), 23-40. (e-reserve)
  • image: "The King of Kowloon" (1998, 29 minutes). (IMS reserve) Video to be screened during conference

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Week Fourteen: Course Wrap-up
Dec 09- (Tu):   Celebration!

  • research project due
  • consider: is there something about the fleshy body that escapes representation? is extra-linguistic and beyond discourse? How can we descrive the uneasy relationship between representations of the body and structures of power?