Chinese Strange Tales: Creating Alternative Realities

3 units

From demon hunters and immortal cultivators to time travelers and otherworldly beings, the themes that dominate today's global media-web novels, streaming series, and video games-have deep cultural and historical roots. This course takes students on a journey of wonder and discovery, uncovering the profound transhistorical and transmedia resonances by exploring what we call "strange tales" in premodern China, from the Six Dynasties to the Qing dynasty (4th-18th centuries). But what makes these tales truly "strange"? Moving beyond traditional supernatural creatures such as ghosts and fox spirits, strangeness operates as a powerful storytelling tool for creating alternative realities that transcend human limitations-inventing parallel worlds, bending time and space, crafting adventures, offering solutions to social problems, and expanding ways of knowing and perceiving. Drawing on literature, media, and game studies, students will develop critical analytical skills to unpack how these tales complicate and question the boundaries between self and other, illusion and reality, knowledge and belief-gaining fresh insights into their pioneering world­ building techniques, interactive strategies, and continuing influence on our digital lives. Students will also have the opportunity to complete a research-based transmedia storytelling project that reimagines a strange tale through a contemporary lens, reinventing it for a different medium such as a game, an interactive fiction, or a short video.