Seminars & Short Courses
Dream of Ding Village: Crises and Controversies in Contemporary China
In this online seminar, we will explore literary texts from the Chinese reform era and new millennium as a lens for examining the consequences of China’s rapid modernization.
Each week will focus on a different contemporary crisis and include a secondary reading related to that topic. Our anchoring novel for the seminar will be Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village (2006), a socially critical novel that chronicles the medical, moral, and ecological decline of a fictional Chinese “AIDS village.”
Class meetings will include a lecture component that provides an overview on Chinese history from the reform era to the present as well as additional context for understanding various social, political, and environmental crises in contemporary China. Participants will be provided with discussion questions in advance and invited to share their own questions and insights during the second half of each session.