Undergraduate Course: Chinese Whispers: China in the Western Imagination, 1600-2008 (HIST10401)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 40 |
ECTS Credits | 20 |
| Summary | China and its people have long been objects of fascination to Western observers. But from admiration to disgust, from stately pleasure-domes to Yellow Peril, the China of Western minds has been invented and reinvented over many centuries of Sino-Western contact. |
| Course description |
This course examines the various ways in which ideas about China and Chinese culture have been imagined and reimagined by Western observers from the seventeenth century to the present day. Weekly seminars are based on the critical analysis of a range of primary sources (including texts, objects, images, architecture, music and films), while the course as a whole asks students to engage with an important body of theoretical scholarship on cross-cultural encounters that has emerged since the late 1970s. By the end of the course, students should be able to place the West¿s current fascination with China within a historical context of which Lord Anson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fu Manchu, Franz Kafka and David Bowie are all a part.
Syllabus (subject to change):
Week 1: Introduction to the Course
Week 2: Orientalism & its Discontents
Week 3: China & Orientalism
Week 4: Travellers Tales 1
Week 5: Travellers Tales 2
Week 6: Chinoiserie
Week 7: China on Stage
Week 8: China in the Garden
Week 9: Case Study: Kew Gardens
Week 10: China Exhibited
Week 11: FEEDBACK WEEK
Week 12: Looted China
Week 13: China in Early Western Photography
Week 14: Chinese Immigrants & the American Dream
Week 15: Birth of the Western Chinatown
Week 16: Case Study: Limehouse
Week 17: China in Twentieth-Century Fiction
Week 18: Case Study: Fu Manchu
Week 19: China on Film 1
Week 20: China on Film 2
Week 21: China in Popular Culture
Week 22: Today's China in Western Minds
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
Students MUST have passed:
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | A pass in 40 credits of third level historical courses or equivalent.
Before enrolling students on this course, PTs are asked to contact the History Honours Admission Administrator to ensure that a place is available (Tel: 503780). |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- demonstrate, by way of coursework and examination, command of the body of knowledge considered in the course;
- demonstrate, by way of coursework and examination, an ability to read, analyse and reflect critically upon relevant scholarship;
- demonstrate, by way of coursework and examination, an ability to understand, evaluate and utilise a variety of primary source material;
- demonstrate, by way of coursework and examination, an ability to develop and sustain scholarly arguments in oral and written form, by formulating appropriate questions and utilising relevant evidence;
- demonstrate independence of mind and initiative, intellectual integrity and maturity, and an ability to evaluate the work of others, including peers.
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Reading List
Ross G. Forman, China in the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge, 2013).
Caroline Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (Chicago, 2011).
Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 (Cambridge, 2006).
Lenore Metrick-Chen, Collecting Objects/Excluding People: Chinese Subjects and American Visual Culture, 1830-1900 (Albany, 2012).
David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, 2002).
David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2010).
Stacey Pierson, From Object to Concept: Global Consumption and the Transformation of Ming Porcelain (Hong Kong, 2013)
Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, 1978).
Stacey Sloboda, Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester, 2014).
Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842-1907 (Athens, OH, 1999).
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
The course will help students to develop the following core graduate attributes:
Skills and abilities in research and enquiry;
Skills and abilities in personal and intellectual autonomy;
Skills and abilities in communication;
Skills and abilities in personal effectiveness.
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| Keywords | Chinese Whispers China |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Stephen Mcdowall
Tel: (0131 6)50 3754
Email: stephen.mcdowall@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Lorraine Nolan
Tel: (0131 6)51 1783
Email: Lorraine.Nolan@ed.ac.uk |
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