Chinese Literature:Theories of the Senses

This class explores the relationship between literary writing and the senses. It investigates the abstraction of thought and its connection with embodied modes of perception. It studies the way texts capture, convey, or suppresses the pleasures and the pains of the senses. It offers an overview of the major works and theories of the senses since the 1990s and discusses a host of classic Chinese literary texts in philosophy, poetry, opera, the novel, and the short story from roughly 500 BCE until 1949. Knowledge of Chinese recommended, but not necessary.