First Year Courses -- Fall 2009
ASIA 194-01 & WGSS 194
Goddesses and ghosts: Images of women in Chinese culture and literature
Much like the vampire and mythical goddess in American and European novels, female ghosts and goddesses are also sources of fascination in Chinese culture. This course uses the trope of goddess and ghost to unravel the gender politics in Chinese culture. We examine how ancient and modern literary texts revise and appropriate images of goddess and ghost to reflect changing attitudes towards gender, identity, body, and the female Other.
Some specific topics include: how the literary representation of goddesses and ghosts intersects with Confucian ideology and its social structure; how the term goddess had been appropriated by male modern reformists for their utopian desire for modernity; how the contemporary obsession with ghost fiction/film is related to Taoist concepts and everyday anxiety; and how women writers intervene within the constraints of the political and social contexts and are therefore imaged as the paranoid in paternal framework.
We will take an interdisciplinary, multimedia approach to gender relations in modern fiction, film, memoir, and other cultural genres. Students will learn the continuation and variation of Chinese tradition in contemporary contexts as well as its intersection with modern ideologies, and develop critical views from gendered perspective.
The course is organized thematically and moves chronologically. No prior knowledge of China or Chinese is needed. Instructor: Xin Yang, Ph.D (xyang@macalester.edu) MWF 10:50-11:50 OLRI 370
JAPA194-01 (First Year Course) Same as Linguistics 194-01 and WGSS 194-02
Language and Gender in Japanese Society
Professor Satoko Suzuki
T/Th 1:20-2:50 Leonard Center 36
Japanese is considered to be a gendered language in the sense that women and men speak differently from each other. Male characters in Japanese animation often use boku or ore to refer to themselves, while female characters often use watashi or atashi. When translated into Japanese, Hermione Granger (a female character in Harry Potter series) ends sentences with soft-sounding forms, while Harry Potter and his best friend Ron use more assertive forms. Do these fictional representations reflect reality? How do these distinct forms come about? Do speakers of Japanese manipulate their language to express themselves? These are some of the questions discussed in this course. Students will have opportunities to learn historical background of gendered language, discover different methodologies in data collection, find out about current discourse on language and gender, and compare gender expressions in Japanese with those in English. No Japanese language ability is required.
|
