150127 SE Modern Chinese Drama: From Realism to Theatre of the Real (2021S)

This seminar centres on the relationship between theatre and realism in China since the twentieth-century to investigate shifting descriptions of reality and the real across historical eras and political regimes. Aims include reflecting on the representation and performance of ethical and ideological change, social transformation, and processes of identity formation and interrogating projections and (self-)perceptions of Chinese reality – or realities – both on the theatrical stage and on the stage of domestic politics and international relations at different stages of socioeconomic development. Furthermore, participants will assess how reality is imagined, dramatized, documented, and reproduced through the different prisms of gender, class, ethnicity, ethics, dichotomies of tradition and modernity, urban and rural, and with respect to issues of nationalism, Westernization, cross-culturalism, and globalization – among others.

The course will encourage participants to think critically about the ideological construction of reality as it is reproduced through stage images and embodied in live performance, and to identify divergent, conflicting and, at times, paradoxical definitions of notions of authenticity, truth, and of what constitutes the real at different times and for different communities of interest throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

The analysis of selected play scripts and theatrical productions from different genres, styles, and stages of Chinese theatre history will show how concepts of realism in literary discourse and dramatic theory changed radically along with radical ideological and institutional change – from the Westernized modernity of the early Republican period to the rise of socialist aesthetics with the founding of the People’s Republic of China, through the utopianism of the Cultural Revolution to the experiments of the reform era, and further into the globalized realities of the new millennium.

The course is divided into thematic blocks and alternates the study of classics of twentieth-century realism with the analysis of twenty-first century adaptations and avant-garde reinterpretations of those canonical texts. The purpose is to identify and assess elements of continuity and change both in terms of literary and aesthetic formulations of realism in China and with respect to perceptions of identity, society, and the real across the two centuries. Topics include May-Fourth realism, Ibsenism, and the “Chinese Noras”; the canonization and deconstruction of China’s realist classics; socialist realism and Beijing-style spoken drama (huaju); revolutionary realism and the “model works” (yangbanxi) of the Cultural Revolution; documentary realism and theatre of the real in postsocialist China.

Course materials will be provided on Moodle at the start of the course and include play scripts, video-recordings of theatrical productions, documentaries, interviews and other audio-visual resources, archival documents, scholarly analyses, and media reviews.

Upon successful completion of the course, participants will have acquired a foundation in the history of modern Chinese drama and familiarized themselves with styles, theories, and critiques of realism and other aesthetic paradigms. They will have enhanced their ability to interpret a range of literary and visual texts and understand their sociological as well as ideological implications.