Chinese Culture I

The course aims to provide several tools to interpret the relationship between the dominant ideologies and certain unofficial routes of the contemporary Sinosphere and its intellectual milieu, including its aesthetic and literary realms. We will first cover the role of the intellectual in modern China, along with the main literary and aesthetic trends, before providing a broader perspective on the Sinophone world as a whole. Some attention be paid to major phenomena and representative figures of the unofficial intellectual sphere, with a particular focus on the role of the minjian , to be critically discussed in context.
The aim of the course is to encourage critical thinking, communication, and research skills among students, by means of both group work and active discussions on selected topics.

During class, students will develop learning skills through the critical reading of texts, in Chinese as well as in Italian and English—as well as communication skills through discussion, written papers, and multimedia presentations. Critical thinking will be encouraged by means of debate and the organization of conferences and/or seminars. At the end of the course,

2. Students will become familiar with:
a. historical and cultural issues of contemporary China and the contemporary Sinosphere.
b. the concept of "Sinophone" and its articulations in the contemporary cultural context, within the domain of Sinophone Studies.
c. the concept of the "unofficial" and its declinations.
d. relevant phenomena in the context of the relationship between the dominant ideological infrastructure and "unofficial" intellectual and aesthetic production.

2. Students will become capable of:
a. moving intellectually and discursively across modern and contemporary Chinese cultural history.
b. articulating a conceptually and terminologically consistent critical discourse on the main unofficial intellectual routes of the contemporary Sinosphere.
c. independently identify research paths on relevant phenomena in contemporary Sinophone intellectual realms.
d. critically reading and interpreting the narratives and intellectual issues addressed by the course.

3. With reference to independent judgment, students will be trained in:
a. problematizing and contextualizing the main intellectual phenomena connected to the political history of contemporary China.
b. identifying the main intellectual trends and movements of different historical-political stages, as well as assessing their impact on the literary and aesthetic production.
c. interpreting the complex relationships between dominant ideologies and the intellectual, literary, and aesthetic production.
d. making use of primary and authoritative secondary sources.

4. Students will enhance their communication skills to:
a. organize public debates and offer multimedia presentations.
b. analyse and comment on texts (also in Chinese) with concepts and terminology consistent with the course.
c. critically rephrase primary and secondary sources also in Chinese.

5. Students will strengthen their ability to:
a. use learning tools and textual/multimedia processing based on cooperative activities.
b. meta-discursively reflect upon specific learning objects.
c. take advantage of the research potential offered by the internet.