Professor Yang has been teaching at Renmin University of China since 1982 and won the “Excellent Teacher” Award from the Beijing Municipal Government. He teaches comparative culture emphasizing values, political philosophy and intellectual history, and supervises doctor candidates in those fields. He has been teaching at TBC since 1998 and teaching courses such as Political Histories since 1949, the Cultural Revolution since 2010, and Modern Chinese Literature in Chinese since 2001. In the U.S., he has taught at Towson University and University of Massachusetts, and lectured at Dickinson College, Wheaton College, etc. He translated Nietzsche’s complete works from German into Chinese.
This course is a close reading of the important works of some great modern Chinese writers and poets, such as Lu Xun, Xu Zhimo, Shen Congwen, Chang Eileen, Yu Hua, and the two Nobel prize winners Gao Xingjianand and Mo Yan. They represent the development and the changes of the modern Chinese literature from 1918 to the present. Students will have the opportunity to explore their own ideas of the main aesthetic characteristics of the Chinese literature in the 20th century, as well as its historical and social background, and be informed of one of the important sides of the modern Chinese culture. With the close reading, students will develop their ability of reading, understanding and criticizing the original Chinese literary work. Students will greatly expand their Chinese vocabularies, especially the literary ones, and develop their skill in writing comments on literary works.
Lectures, readings, paper assignments, and discussions are designed to help you develop the skills to:
• Think aesthetically, read critically, and write and speak persuasively in Chinese.
• Connect and integrate aesthetical appreciations and cultural understandings of the modern Chinese literature, and grasp the styles and creative skills of different Chinese poets and writers in their original Chinese.
• Develop the skill of writing literary criticism in Chinese.
• Develop the practice of reading original Chinese literary texts within their peculiar Chinese social, historical, cultural and mental contexts.
