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Semester 2

Media and Visual Culture in Modern China (ASST10151)

Subject

Asian Studies

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

4

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting Students who are non-native speakers of Chinese MUST be able to demonstrate an intermediate level of proficiency in Chinese (especially in reading). Entry is at the discretion of the Course Organiser.

Course Summary

This course examines print media and visual culture in modern China (1880-1949), as well as the ways in which they interacted with political, social and cultural transformations. Late Qing and Republican China witnessed a flourishing of visual culture thanks to the rapid development of print media (newspapers, pictorials, and film magazines, etc), photography, and cinema. This rich repertoire of visual sources offers valuable insights into the dynamics of societal change in China's modern history. This course explores a number of important visual genres (cartoon, calendar poster, photography, film, and woodcut) as well as individual periodicals. Visual methodologies will be introduced to conduct in-depth analysis of the visual sources. At the same time, a number of themes will be discussed throughout the course, including modernity, nationalism, gender, propaganda, and urbanisation. Students will be required to give presentations, using particular visual methodologies to analyse assigned primary visual materials, with an engagement with assigned secondary literature. The main goal of this course is to enhance students' research skills in dealing with primary sources, and to gain a deeper understanding of the specialised field of media and visuality in modern China.

Course Description

The themes covered by this course include The Dianshizhai Pictorial (1884-1898); political cartoons in the late Qing and early Republican era; calendar posters (yuefenpai) and advertising; photography; Liangyou (The Young Companion) and pictorials in the 1920s and 1930s; cartoon art and urban culture in the 1930s; film culture; wartime propaganda art (1937-1945); and woodcuts and communist propaganda. This course will address the following key questions: What are the main visual features of the particular genre/media? What are the ways in which meanings are constructed? How do the images represent gender? What are the roles of these visual sources in China's burgeoning urban commercial culture and modernisation? In what ways does Chineseness manifest itself in these imported visual genres? What is the relationship between technologies and the visibility of China's modern "objects" in various forms? How do the images address national issues of the time? The course will be taught via synchronous seminars and asynchronous activities. Students are required to read assigned readings from primary and secondary sources. For each session, one or two students will give a presentation on the theme of the week and receive written feedback from the lecturer. The presentation will be assessed as 20% of the final mark. Discussions of visual sources will be guided by a set of questions and undertaken in small groups asynchronously; discussion summary will be presented in the following seminar. Class participation will be assessed as 20% of the final mark. Students will submit a 3,000 word essay (60% of the final mark) at the end of the course.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

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