SYLLABUS
WEEKLY READING SCHEDULE
Note: please keep an eye on the online syllabus as it may 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 on main reserve. See reserve list (link can be found at top of each page of the course website).
PART ONE: TERMS OF THE COURSE: Visuality, Modernity, and East/West
Week One : Perspectives on Modern China
Aug 28 - (Tu): Introduction to Critical Terms and the Issue of Translation
- Martin Jay, "Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn," Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 3 (December 2002): 267-78. (search Reed library database under journal title; available in electronic form through SAGE).
Aug 29 - (Wed): Carma Hinton's documentary "Abode of Illusion: The life and art of Chang Dai-chien (1899-1983)" (1993) 5:30-6:30, ETC 208
Aug 30 - (Th): What is "Modern Chinese Art?" A Case Study of Chang Dai-chien's Painting Practice
- Rosalind E Krauss,"The Originality of the Avant-Garde" in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1989), 151-170. (main reserve)
- Fu Shen, Challenging the Past: The Paintings of Chang Dai-chien (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press in association with Sackler Gallery, 1991), chpt 3 "Painting Theory," 32-47. (e-reserves and doc file)
- Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, "Shanghai Modern" in Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 18-68. (main reserve; available for purchase in bookstore).
----------------- Further Reading | Links ------------------
top
Week Two: (Art Historical) Approaches to Visual Culture
Sept 4- (Tu) : Debating Visual Culture
- Vanessa R Schwartz and Jeannene Pryzblyski, "Visual Culture's History: Twenty-first century interdisciplinarity and its nineteenth-century objects," in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Schwartz and Pryzblyski (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 3-14. (e-reserves)
- Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, "Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics," in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 1998), 27-49. (main reserve)
- "Visual Culture Questionnaire," October 77 (Summer 1996): 25-70. (JSTOR) Read through these short essays with an eye to whom you agree and disagree with in preparation for discussion. Turn in one paragraph supporting one position and one paragraph disputing or questioning one position.
Sept 6- (Th) : Vision and Visuality in Early Modern China (A Comparative Approach)
- Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1988), 2-27. (e-reserves)
- Norman Bryson, "The Gaze in the Expanded Field" in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1988), 86-113. (e-reserves).
- Anne Burkus-Chasson, "'Clouds and Mists That Emanate and Sink Away': Shitao's Waterfall on Mount Lu and Practices of Observation in the Seventeeth Century," Art History 19, no. 2 (June 1996): 168-90. (search Reed library database under journal title; available in electronic form through Academic Search Premier).
----------------- Further Reading | Links ------------------
top
PART TWO: VISUAL MODERNITY IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA (ca. 1800-1911): INCURSIONS OF "THE WEST" INTO CHINA AND CHINESE RESPONSES
Week Three: Sites of Looking: Spaces of Ideology and Contestation
Sept 11- (Tu): Habermas' Public Sphere in China? Exploring the Dominant Spatial Paradigmdiscussion faciliators: Lindsey, Greg, Lucy
- Meng Yue, "Re-envisioning the Urban Interior: Gardens and the Paradox of the Public Sphere," Shanghai and the Edges of Empires (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 139-170 (PDF warning: do not read the chapter on e-reserves, which is the WRONG chapter)
- Bryna Goodman, "Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme, or, How to Read a Celebration of a Transnational Urban Community," The Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 4 (November 2000): 889-926 (JSTOR)
- Rudolf G. Wagner, "The Role of the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere," China Quarterly no. 142 (June 1995): 423-43. (JSTOR)
- Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, tr. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 1-26. (e-reserves)
Sept 13 - (Th): Shanghai, "Paris of the East"
discussion facilitators: Europa, Erika
NOTE: Please email Europa and Erika any paintings or prints produced in Paris around the turn of the century that you feel would help us all better understand what it might be to act the flaneur in either Shanghai or Paris.
- Jonathan Hay, "Painting and the Built Environment in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai," Chinese Art Modern Expressions, ed Maxwell Hearn (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 61-101. (main reserve and PDF)
- Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," excerpted in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural History, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 33-40. (PDF)
- Guy Debord, "Theory of the Dérive," in Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, ed Joanne Morra and Marquard Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 3: 77-81. (e-reserves; note that there are two essays by Debord on e-reserve, so be sure to download the correct one)
- David Harvey, "Extract from 'Cartographic Identities: Geographical Knowledges under Globalization,'" in Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, ed Joanne Morra and Marquard Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 3: 235-39. (e-reserves)
----------------- Further Reading | Links ------------------
top
Week Four: Ren Bonian (Ren Yi) and the Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai School of Painting (haipai)
Sept 18 - (Tu): Borders and Contact Zones in Shanghai School Painting (haipai)
discussion faciliators: Alia, Ashley, Naomi
- Yu-chih Lai, "Remapping Borders: Ren Bonian's Frontier Paintings and Urban Life in 1880s Shanghai," The Art Bulletin 86, no. 3 (September 2004): 550-572 (available through Academic Search Premier, not yet available through JSTOR).
- Susan Stanford Friedman, "Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies," MODERNISM/modernity 13, no 3 (2006): 425-433. (Project Muse)
Sept 20 - (Th): Between Camera and Paintbrush
discussion faciliators: Monica, Ryan, Ryland
- Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990), chapter 4, "Techniques of the Observer." (e-reserves, also available in bookstore)
- John Thomson, Through China with a Camera (Westminster: A Constable & Co, 1898), excerpt: 29-31 "Chinese Artists" (e-reserves)
- Richard Vinograd, "Satire and Situation: Images of the Artist in Late Nineteenth-Century China," Phoebus 8 (1998): 110-131. (e-reserves)
- Zhang Hongxing, "From Slender Eyes to Round: A Study of Ren Yi's Portraiture in the Context of Contemporary Photography" (1994 manuscript)
- TURN IN PORTFOLIOS; they will be returned to you on Tuesday, September 25
----------------- Further Reading | Links ------------------
top
Week Five: Exhibiting Modernity
For each of these conference sessions, please bring in one well-crafted question about one or more of the readings.
Sept 25- (Tu): China's First Museum
- Lisa Claypool, "Zhang Jian and China's First Museum," Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 3 (August 2005): 567-604. (JSTOR)
- Barbara Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the art of collecting ( Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), chapter 1 "Postmodernism and the Annilhilation of Resemblence." (PDF)
- James Hevia, "Looting Beijing: 1860, 1900," in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, ed. Lydia Liu (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 192-213. (e-reserves)
Sept 27 - (Th): The Exhibitionary Impulse
- Peter de Bolla, "The Visibility of Visuality" in Vision in Context, eds. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 65-79. (PDF)
- Lisa Claypool, "Chinese Painting in the National Essence Journal (1905-1911), Exhibition Culture, and Experiments in National Vision" (manuscript PDF).
- Richard Vinograd, "Private Art and Public Knowledge in Later Chinese Painting" in Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation, eds. Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion, 176-202 (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press). (e-reserves; OPTIONAL READING)
- 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
----------------- Further Reading | Links ------------------
top
Week Six: Cognitive Image Histories
OSTROW ADDRESS Professor Barbara Stafford, University of Chicago
7:00 Monday, Vollum Auditorium (please plan to attend)
Oct 2 - (Tu): Conference will not meet. I strongly encourage you to attend the workshop led by Professor Stafford on Tuesday (4:15) and/or Wednesday (4:45) in Library 41. On Tuesday the theme will be "Attention" (reading: Echo Objects, chpt 6) and on Wednesday the theme will be
"The significance of tight-figure formats" (reading: Echo Objects , chpt 2).
On Wednesday there will be a dinner (invitation only) for members of this conference and upper-level Art majors with Professor Stafford in the Commons after the workshop has concluded.
Oct 4 - (Th): "Towards a Cognitive Image History" Barbara Stafford, guest
- Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), introduction (main reserve and available at bookstore)
- Stafford, "Romantic Systematics and the Genealogy of Thought: The Formal Roots of a Cognitive History of Images," Configurations 12.3 (2004): 315-48. (Project Muse)
If you would like Lisa to respond to portfolio entries, please give them to her in conference. They will be returned on Tuesday. Also note: Tuesday we meet in SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, Lib LL2.
----------------- Further Reading | Links ------------------
top
PART THREE: EXPANSION AND INTENSIFICATION OF THE DEBATE ON MODERNITY IN REPUBLICAN-ERA CHINA (1911-1949)
Week Seven: Shifting Modes of Representation: Print Culture
Oct 9 - (Tu): The Nineteenth-Century Lithograph Revisited
Meet in Special Collections, Lib LL2
- Laikwan Pang, "The Pictorial Turn: Realism, Modernity, and China's Print Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century," Visual Studies 20, no. 1 (April 2005): 16-36 (Academic Search Premier)
- Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), "Mythic History: Fetish," 78-109. OPTIONAL
- David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siecle Splendor: Repressed modernities of late Qing fiction, 1849-1911 ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), introduction. (e-reserves)
- Don Cohn, Vignettes from the Chinese: Lithographs from Shanghai in the Late Nineteenth Century (Hong Kong: Renditions Paperback, 1987). Copy at Lisa's office, Lib 321. Choose one lithograph and story that demonstrates "realism" to you; bring digital image of it to conference. We will discuss as many as time permits. If we do not get to your picture (and even if we do), please include in portfolio entry for this day.
Oct 11 - (Th): Photography's Magical Modernity
discussion faciliators: Amanda, Lila, Angela
- Laikwan Pang, "Magic and Modernity in China," positions 12, no 2 (2004): 299-327 (Project Muse)
- Don Slater, "Photography and Modern Vision: The spectacle of 'modern magic,'" in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 218-37. (e-reserves)
- Long Chin San, "Composite Pictures and Chinese Art (1942)," Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 154-73. (main reserve)
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone books, 1994), "Separation Perfected" 11-24. (e-reserves)
---------------- Further Reading | Links -------------------
top
Oct 13-21 Fall Break
Lisa will not have office hours on Monday, October 22
Week Eight: Cosmopolitanism and Painting: The Shanghai Art Scene
Oct 23- (Tu): Two Artists: Lin Fengmian and Xu Beihong
discussion faciliators: Ayesha, Gelsey
- David Der-wei Wang, "In the Name of the Real," Chinese Art Modern Expressions (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 28-59. (main reserve)
- Xu Jiang, "The Misreading of Life," Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 72-84. (main reserve)
- Lin Fengmian, "A Letter to China's Artistic Community" (1927), Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 371-78. (main reserve)
- Xu Beihong, "I am Bewildered (1929)," in Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 373-374. (main reserve)
- Xu Zhimo, "I am 'Bewildered' Too: A Letter to Xu Beihong (1929)," in Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 374-377. (main reserve)
Oct 25 - (Th): The Storm Society
discussion faciliators: Europa, Lindsey
Note: if any of the Chinese pictures we are looking at today remind you of European or American paintings, please email Europa and Lindsey to bring them to their attention. Images are available through ARTStor on the images page.
- Zheng Shengtian, "Waves Lashed the Bund from the West: Shanghai's Art Scene in the 1930s," Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 174-199. (main reserve)
- "The Storm Society Manifesto (October 1932)," in Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 234-235. (main reserve)
- Ni Yide, "A Galaxy of the Storm Society (1 October 1935)," in Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 236-241. (main reserve)
- "The Storm Society, Interview: Yang Taiyang," in Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 242-247. (main reserve)
- Michael Sullivan, "Reminiscences of Pang Xunqin (1946)" in Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 248-53. (main reserve)
- Pang Xunqin, "My Memories: Visit to Berlin," in Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 254-59. (main reserve)
- Ralph Crozier article in Jason Kuo?
- portfolio due; will be returned on Thursday, November 3
----------------- Further Reading | Links ------------------
top
Week Nine: Mass Media and the Public Sphere: Graphic Arts and Typography
Oct 30 - (Tu): Calligraphy and Typography
discussion faciliators: Ryan, Ryland, Caitlin
- Lothar Ledderose, "Aesthetic Appropriation of Ancient Calligraphy in Modern China," Chinese Art Modern Expressions (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 213-245. (main reserve)
- Ellen Johnston Laing, "Art Deco and Modernist Art in Chinese Calendar Posters," Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s, ed. Jason C. Kuo (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2007), 241-278. (e-reserve)
- Judy Andrews and Shen Kuiyi, excerpt from "Commercial Art and China's Modernization," in A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Century China (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998), 184-195. (main reserve)
- WJT Mitchell, "Word and Image," in Critical Terms for Art History, 2d ed., eds. Schiff and Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), PDF.
Nov 1 - (Th): From China to Germany and Back: Woodcut Prints
We will
to look at Käthe Kollwitz prints from the Reed Collection in conference. They include: 1990.087 Head of a man, from Galeries St. Etienne label, 1922, woodcut on rice paper, 2 3/4" x 2 5/8"; 1990.088 Inspiration, 1905, etching, 21 3/4" x 12 1/8"; 1990.089 Parents, 1919, lithograph, 13 1/2" x 19 1/2"; 1990.086 Four Men in a Tavern, date unknown, etching
discussion faciliators: Erika, Alia, Ayesha
- Shen Kuiyi, "The Modernist Woodcut Movement in 1930s China," Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 262-289. (main reserve)
- Lu Xun, "Written in the Deep of the Night: On Käthe Kollwitz (7 April 1936)," Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 290-291. (main reserve)
- Lu Xun, "A Defence of 'Picture Books' (1932)," Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 292-295. (main reserve)
- Alessandra Comini, "Kollwitz in Context" in Käthe Kollwitz (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992), 89-114. (e-reserve)
- Mieke Bal, "Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture," Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 2 (2003): 5-32. (Sage Journals Online)
----------------- Further Reading | Links ------------------
top
Week Ten: Women and Modernity
Nov 6 - (Tu): Fashioning Modernity: Qipao Dresses and Unbound Feet
discussion faciliators: Angela, Monica, Naomi, Amanda
- Paula Zamperini, "On Their Dress They Wore a Body: Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai," positions 11, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 301-330. (Project Muse)
- Dorothy Ko, "Jazzing into Modernity: High Heels, Platforms, and Lotus Shoes," in China Chic: East Meets West, ed. Valerie Steele and John Major (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 140-153. (e-reserve)
- Bao Mingxin, "Shanghai Fashion in the 1930s," Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 318-334. (main reserve)
- Carole Turbin, "Refashioning the Concept of Public/Private: Lessons from Dress Studies," Journal of Women's History 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 43-51 (Project Muse)
- refined research project precis and annotated bibliography due
Nov 8 - (Th): The Modern Woman and Consumer Culture
discussion faciliators: Lila, Ashley, Gelsey
- Francesca Dal Lago, "Crossed Legs in 1930s Shanghai: How 'Modern' the Modern Woman?" East Asian History 19 (June 2000): 103-144. (e-reserve)
- Tani E Barlow, "History and the Border," Journal of Women's History 18, no. 2 (2006): 8-32 (Project Muse)
- Xu Hong, "Early 20th-Century Women Painters in Shanghai," Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 200-215. (main reserve)
- Liang You: The Young Companion
----------------- Further Reading | Links ------------------
top
Week Eleven: Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge: Cinema in the 1930s
Nov 12 (Mon): You and interested friends are invited to the screening of "The Goddess of Shanghai" (Shennü) (1934, starring Ruan Lingyu) Psychology 105, 5:00-6:15
Nov 13 - (Tu): The Cinematic Gaze
discussion faciliators: Greg, Lucy, Caitlin
- Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Visual and Other Pleasures (New York: Macmillan, 1989). (e-reserves).
- Leo Oufan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 190-231 "Face, Body and the City: The Fiction of Liu Na'ou and Mu Shiying" (5 copies on main reserve)
Nov 15- (Th): The Silver Screen: A Case Study of "The Goddess"
- Zheng Dongtian, "Films and Shanghai," Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 298-307. (main reserve)
- Hu Die, "A Tour of a German Film Studio," Shanghai Modern (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2004), 308-315. (main reserve)
- Laikwan Pang, "Women's Stories On-Screen versus Off Screen," in Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932-1937 (New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield). (PDF)
- Kristine Harris, "The New Woman Incident: Cinema, Scandal and Spectacle in 1935 Shanghai" in Transnational Chinese Cinemas, ed Sheldon Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997), chapter 11. (PDF)
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17 optional trip to the Seattle Asian Art Museum to see the exhibit "SHU" meet at Eliot Circle at 9 am; will return late in the day
----------------- Further Reading | Links ------------------
top
Week Twelve: Visual Culture of Wartime Shanghai
Nov 20 - (Tu): watch "Zuflucht in Shanghai: The Port of Last Resort" (1998) 1 hr. 20 min.--the screening will begin promptly at 2:40 and will end at 4:00.
November 22-25 Thanksgiving Vacation
----------------- Further Reading | Links ------------------
top
Week Thirteen: Visual Culture of Wartime Shanghai (continued)
Nov 27 - (Tu): Wartime Surveillance: The Jewish Ghetto in Shanghai
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison. Tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) on PANOPTICISM (chapter 3) and discussion of "Zuflucht in Shanghai" (Foucault available on main reserve and in bookstore; I encourage you to read more than the one chapter on the panopticon)
Nov 29 - (Th): The Legacy of the Modern in Post-Mao 1980s China
- Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-garde, 1979-1989, A Semiotic Analysis (Hong Kong: timezone 8, 2003), pp. 22-27; 66-74; 76-91; 132-151 (for PDF files, click here: Yang1, Yang2, Yang3).
- Richard Vinograd, "Relocations: Spaces of Chinese Visual Modernity," in Chinese Art, Modern Expressions (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), 162-181 (main reserve)
- TURN IN PORTFOLIOS; THEY WILL BE RETURNED TO YOU ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 10 at 5 pm (for the portfolio entry for today's conference, please critique the Vinograd piece)
----------------- Further Reading | Links -- ----------------
top
Dec 4 - (Tu): The Legacy Continues: Course wrap-up
- research project due
Dec 10 - (M): papers and portfolios available at Lisa's office at 5 pm