HUMS 401, Interpretations - The Dream of the Red Chamber

Meeting Time: 
MW 11.35-12.50

Course Description:

Close reading of the eighteenth-century Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber in translation, with some attention to secondary and theoretical materials. The novel is used to examine humanistic questions, including what it means to read across cultures.

Syllabus

Led by:

Professor Howard Bloch

Professor Howard Bloch is Sterling Professor of French at Yale University. He has written on a variety of topics in and around medieval literature and social history, legal, economic, familial, and political institutions, humor and the fabliaux, gender and the rise of Western romantic love and the history of the discipline of Medieval Studies.

Bloch holds a medal from the Collège de France, is an officer in the Order of Arts and Letters, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society.  He is currently completing a book on Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard.” 

Professor Tina Lu

Professor Lu’s research and teaching focus on the literature of late imperial China, from around 1550 to around 1750.

Major publications include Persons, Roles and Minds (Stanford, 2001), Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2009), a book-length chapter on late Ming literary culture in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, v.2, and a co-edited volume on Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone (MLA).

She is currently working on three projects: a book already drafted on how late imperial people conceived of objects and materiality, a collaborative project on the sixteenth-century playwright and painter Xu Wei, and a major digital initiative that will enable collaborative philological work.