THE FANTASTIC IN PRE-MOD CHINA

From the Daoist philosophical text Zhuangzi to the famous novel The Journey to the West, the "fantastic" has always been part of Chinese literature that pushes human imagination and questions the boundary of reality. Readers and writers created fantastic beasts (though not always knowing where to find them), passed down ghost stories, rationalized bizarre occurrences, and dismissed, sometimes embraced, tales that could potentially subvert their established framework of knowledge. The fantastic is also historically and culturally contingent. What one regards as fantastic reveals more about the perceiving subjects---their values, judgment, anxiety, identity, and cultural burdens. How do fantastic texts problematize the definition of humanity? How does the fantastic complicate our understanding of narrative, truth, and epistemology? How did premodern Chinese writers use the fantastic to approach and propose solutions to pressing social issues? Using “fantastic” literature as a critical lens, this course takes a thematic approach to the masterpieces of Chinese literature from the first millennium BCE up until late imperial China. The topics that we will explore include shifting human/non-human boundaries, representations of the foreign land (also the “underworld”), the aestheticization of female ghosts, and the fantastic as social criticism and allegory. All materials and discussions are in English.