Instructor: C. Zhang
Our common understanding of melodrama refers to a set of subgenres that remain close to the heart and hearth and feature a heightened emotionalism and moral contrast. This melodramatic, or excessive, narrative and imagination has also been a prevalent mode dealing with intercultural clashes and historical conflict. This course explores melodramatic imaginations in literature, film, and drama mainly at three historical and geopolitical moments: the eighteenth century, the interwar period, and the present global era. The goal of this course is to investigate the history and imagination of global interrelations through melodramatic representation and inquiry in Chinese, European, and American literature and culture. In the end, we aim to develop a critical understanding of race, gender, immigration, and border thinking in our globalized world. Course materials range from Chinese Ming drama in the 16th century to present-day popular film Farewell, my Concubine, from Friedrich Schiller’s theory of drama to Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, from Turkish-German film Head On to Chinese American novel American Knees.
