Program
Summer Humanities Seminar 2006
Syllabus
Instructors
(1) Miranda Brown
3070 Frieze Building
615-7036
mdbrown@umich.edu
(2) Martin Powers
120A Tappan Hall
764-5402
mpow@umich.edu
Course requirements:
(1) “Reaction” papers to selected reading assignments. These should be no more than
one or two paragraphs.
(2) Reviews of selected readings.
(3) 10-page term paper on the themes and materials presented in class.
Schedule of Readings:
China
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard, 2004).
Frank, Andre Gunder, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, 1-51.
Zhang, Longxi, “The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 15,
no. 1 (Autumn, 1988), 108-131.
Institutions and Culture
Brown, Miranda, "Friends or Subordinates?: The Rhetoric of Political Association," in Brown,
The Rhetorics of Mourning, ms. forthcoming.
Powers, M., "Rival Politics and Rival Tastes in Late Han China," Cultural Differentiation and
Cultural Identity in the Visual Arts, (London, 1989), 63-79.
Hartwell, Robert M., “Financial Expertise, Examinations, and the Formulation of Economic
Policy in Northern Sung China,” in John A. Harrison, ed., China: Enduring Scholarship (Tuscon:
University of Arizona Press, 1972), 31-64.
Powers, M.J., 1998, “When is a Landscape like a Body?” Landscape, Culture, and Power, ed.,
Yeh Wen-hsin. Center for Chinese Studies, Berkeley, 1-21.
Culture as a Site of Negotiation
Ho, Wai-kam, "Late Ming Literati: Their Social and Cultural Ambience," in Chu-tsing Li and
James C.Y. Watt, eds., The Scholar's Studio (London, 1987), 23-36.
Craig Clunas, Superflous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China
(Urbana, 1991), 75-115; 166-173.
Carlitz, Katherine, The rhetoric of Chin p’ing mei.
Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chamber: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
Recommended:
Bourdieu, Pierre, “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production, Randal
Johnson, ed., (New York, 1993), 112 - 141.
The Politics of Voice and Vision
Robert Bagley, “Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture,” Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies 58.1 (1998): 256-264. (E-journals).
Wu Hung, “A Response to Robert Bagley's Review of my Book Monumentality in Early Chinese
Art and Architecture (Stanford University Press, 1995),” Archives of Asian Art 51 (1998-1999):
92-102.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, “The Multiple Viewpoint," in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing
Africans and Jews, (New York, 2000), 1-16; Ahmad, Aijiz, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness
and ‘National Allegory,’” 77-82.
Rey Chow, Primitive Passion: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese
Cinema (New York, 1995).
Of Clashes and Cultures
Teng, Ssu-yü, “China’s Examination System and the West,” HJAS 1943.
Lovejoy, Arthur, “The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism,” in Lovejoy, Essays in the History of
Ideas (Baltimore, 1948), 99-135.
Lottes, Gunther, “China in European Political Thought, 1750 – 1850, in Thomas Lee, ed., China
and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Hong Kong: Chinese
University Press, 1991), 65 – 98.
Stephen Owen, “The Anxiety of Global Influence: What is World Poetry." New Republic (Nov
19, 1990):28-32.
Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity--
China, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).