Memory and Meaning in Post-Mao Chinese Literature

4.0 credits

With the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and the florescence of an increasingly, if cautiously, permissive literary and cultural environment in post-Mao China, young authors began to process the traumas of the high communist era (1949-1976) in general, and the violent excesses of the Cultural Revolution in particular. In this course, we will examine the relationship between traumatic memory and the construction or rehabilitation of meaning in various works of literature starting from shortly after the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution and reaching into the twenty-first century.