EALC522 - Chinese Fiction & Drama

This course explores Romance of Three Kingdoms the most popular classica l novel in East Asia and an important source for understanding Chinese culture, politics, history, and military strategy. We propose to read this work not only as a textbook of Chinese literature and culture, but also as a guidebook for career development and risk assessment. Why didn't t Pangtong have a career as successful as Zhuge Liang? Why did Ma Su volunteer in a project that he is not good at? If Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Sun Quan run for presidency in the U.S., who would you vote for and why? These are some of the questions that we will explore alongside our inquiry into the the historical development of various genres of Chinese fiction. In addition to Romance of Three Kingdoms, this course introduces Sun Tsu's The Art of War and other classical Chinese novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber and Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, as well as classical literary criticism such as Cao Pi's On the Standard of Literature (Dian lun), Lu Ji's Essays on Literature (Wen lun), and Liu Xie's The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons.