This course guides second and third year students to read a series of coming-of-age narratives in Chinese literature and cinemas. It offers a range of literary and cinematic texts that not only ‘ enrich your understanding of modern China and improve your ability to read literature and film, but also provide you with a variety of coming-of-age narratives that may resonate with your own experience. Integrating academic pursuit with personal quest, I hope the course will allow you to reflect on your own experience of growing up and become more conscious in your negotiation with the current time.
Course content
1. The modern discourse of youth.
2. The Idealism of “New Youth”.
3. The desire to be modern: love and revolution.
4. The revolutionary youth.
5. The return of the individual in post-revolutionary China.
6. Historical trauma and the small-town youth.
7. Negotiating between East and West: coming of age as a Chinese-American woman.
8. The loss of a world: youth and the changing politics of Taiwan.
9. Coming of age in the creolized world of the rainforest.
10. Made in Hong Kong: the lost youth and the reinvention of idealism.
11. The Tiny Times of consumerism: Euphoria and Dystopia.
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