Undergraduate Program

Chinese Courses

Below is a list of recently offered undergraduate courses. Not all of these courses are offered in any given year, and there may be other courses offered some years. Check the course schedules/descriptions available via the Registrar's Office for the official schedules for the widest range of terms for which such information is available.

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CHI 101 ELEMENTARY CHINESE I

This 6-credit course is designed for beginners of Chinese. It introduces students to the sounds, basic sentence structures, and the writing system of Mandarin Chinese. Pinyin, the phonetic translation system, is taught and required throughout the course. Emphasis will be on developing listening and speaking skills as well as building a vocabulary based on 400 ideographic characters.

Last Offered: Fall 2019

CHI 102 ELEMENTARY CHINESE II

This 6-credit course is the continuation of Chinese 101. Knowledge of Pinyin is required. The focus continues to be on developing listening and speaking skills with an increasing emphasis on reading and writing in ideographic characters. It aims to build a vocabulary based on 500 characters.

Prerequisites: CHI 101 or placement
Last Offered: Spring 2020

CHI 111 INTENSIVE ELEMENTARY CHINESE

This 8-credit intensive Chinese course is designed for beginners of Chinese, it covers our regular semester CH101 and CH102 in eight weeks in an intensive manner. The curriculum goal is the same as both CH101 and CH102 and uses the same textbook. It is specifically designed for students who would like to learn Chinese, but whose busy schedules have prevented them during regular semesters. After learning this summer course, students will have an ideal beginning and solid foundation for further Chinese study and can continue on to CH151. This is one of the core courses in the Chinese program that counts toward cluster, minor or major. The course introduces students to the sounds, basic sentence structures, and the writing system of Mandarin Chinese. Pinyin, the phonetic translation system, is taught and required throughout the course. Emphasis will be on developing listening and speaking skills as well as building a vocabulary based on 800-1000 Chinese characters.

Last Offered: Summer 2018

CHI 113 INTRODUCTION TO CLASSICAL CHINESE I

Students will become acquainted with the grammar and construction of Classical Chinese language—the written form that prevailed in China for centuries, into the early twentieth century when it was gradually replaced by vernacular writing. Any student interested in conducting original research on China prior to the twentieth century will find the course useful for deciphering older documents and even for reading more recent documents that may be heavily inflected with Classical-style diction. Emphasis will be on learning to read Classical Chinese, but in-class exercises will also include pronunciation and writing in Classical Chinese in order to ensure student comprehension. Minimum of one year of Modern Chinese language or equivalent required; two years preferred.

Prerequisites: CHI 102, CHI 111, or instructor's permission
Last Offered: Fall 2018

CHI 114 CONVERSATIONAL CHINESE I

Emphasis on speaking skills with focus on current issues in Chinese culture and society. May be taken concurrently with CHI 151.

Prerequisites: CHI 102, CHI 111, or instructor's permission
Last Offered: Fall 2019

CHI 115 CONVERSATIONAL CHINESE II

Emphasis on speaking skills with focus on current issues in Chinese culture and society. May be taken concurrently with CHI 152.

Prerequisites: CHI 114 or instructor's permission
Last Offered: Spring 2020

CHI 116 INTRO CLASSICAL CHINESE II

This course is a continuation of CHI 113. Students will continue to study the grammar and construction of Classical Chinese language—the written form that prevailed in China for centuries, into the early twentieth century when it was gradually replaced by vernacular writing. Emphasis will be on learning to read Classical Chinese texts, but in-class exercises will also include pronunciation and writing in Classical Chinese in order to ensure student comprehension.

Prerequisites: CHI 113, or instructor's permission
Last Offered: Spring 2018

CHI 151 INTERMEDIATE CHINESE I

This course is the continuation of CHI 102 (or CHI 111). Knowledge of the Pinyin system is required for the purpose of pronunciation. The course continues to focus on developing communication skills with an increasing emphasis on reading and writing ideographic characters and expanding vocabulary. Course work includes two weekly recitation sessions.

Prerequisites: CHI 102, CHI 111, or placement
Last Offered: Fall 2019

CHI 152 INTERMEDIATE CHINESE II

Continuation of Chinese 151. Supplementary materials will include short selections from contemporary Chinese writings. Written compositions in Chinese are required. A study of modern colloquial and literary styles, drawn from contemporary writings, readings, and movies scripts in material of social and cultural interests. Basic grammar and syntax will be constantly reviewed. Special emphasis will be devoted to the expansion of reading vocabulary, sentence patterns, writing and oral skills.

Prerequisites: CHI 151 or placement
Last Offered: Spring 2020

CHI 201A PRE-MODERN CHI LITERATURE

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CHI 202 ADVANCED INTERMEDIATE CHINESE I

This course covers various aspects of contemporary Chinese culture as found in magazines, journals, television, film and videos. Class taught in Chinese.

Prerequisites: CHI 152 or placement
Last Offered: Fall 2019

CHI 203 ADVANCED INTERMEDIATE CHINESE II

This course covers various aspects of contemporary Chinese culture as found in magazines, journals, television, film and videos. Class taught in Chinese.

Prerequisites: CHI 202 or placement
Last Offered: Spring 2020

CHI 204 ADVANCED CONVERSATIONAL CHINESE

Study abroad course.

CHI 205 ADVANCED CHINESE I

This course covers various aspects of contemporary Chinese culture as found in magazines, journals, television, film and videos. Taught in Chinese.

Prerequisites: CHI 203 or placement
Last Offered: Fall 2019

CHI 206 ADVANCED CHINESE II

Based on a Chinese culture heritage course, taught in Chinese. Focus on reading, writing and demonstrating in Chinese with power point.

Prerequisites: CHI 205 or placement
Last Offered: Spring 2020

CHI 210 INTRODUCTION TO TRADITIONAL CHINESE CULTURE

An overview of China's traditional culture through the most prominent examples of it visual, literary, and performing arts, with attention to the social contexts of aesthetic experience.

CHI 211 INTRODUCTION TO PRE-MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE AND CULTURE

In this survey we will read major authors, works, and literary genres of Chinese literature before the 20th century, with attention to several central and intertwining themes: literature and the spaces of the imagination; the experience of the past and the subversion of tradition; changing relations between fiction and history; the reimagining of gender relations through the retelling of narratives; and the emergence of a vibrant urban culture. No background in Chinese literature is required or assumed.

Last Offered: Fall 2017

CHI 212 CITIES & THE COUNTRY IN MODERN CHINA

Explores changing cultural meanings of country and city from early 20th century urban culture through revolution and to the present era of mass migration and urban destruction and renewal.

Last Offered: Fall 2016

CHI 213 THE HISTORY & STRUCTURE OF CHINESE & JAPANESE

It is well known that Chinese civilization was central to the broad historical development of East Asian cultures including that of Japan, a relationship that might suggest that of ancient Hellenic Greek and Italic Latin. While much of Japan’s vocabulary and its writing system are rooted in Chinese, however, it is less well known that Chinese and Japanese belong in fact to two entirely unrelated language families, Sinic and Japonic. This course examines the linguistic structures, historical development and interactions of the two languages. Course topics include: theories of origins and language-family affiliations; the historical development of phonological and grammatical features; the development of writing systems; and the complex role played by language in cultural influence and interaction.

Last Offered: Spring 2015

CHI 214 DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER

This course is devoted to an intensive reading of the greatest work of Chinese prose fiction, the eighteenth-century novel, Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng). We will pay close attention to the novel’s extended reflection on the relations between illusion, reality, and fabrication; its subversion of historical narrative; its construction of architectural and “natural” spaces; its intense obsession with the sensuousness of material culture; and its powerful narration of desire in early modern China. No background in Chinese literature, culture, or language assumed. All readings in English.

Last Offered: Fall 2018

CHI 214W DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER

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Last Offered: Fall 2018

CHI 215 WRITING, VISUALITY, AND THE POWERS OF IMAGES

In this course, we will examine how literature from China, Japan, Turkey, and the West explores such questions of images. We will track how understandings of the powers of images change, persist, and are re-appropriated across historical time and cultural space, and consider the critical light “premodern” texts and texts from our “modern” world of images can project upon each other.

Last Offered: Fall 2014

CHI 216 TOWARD A SOCIAL LITERATURE: THE COEVOLUTION OF LITERATURE AND SOCIETY IN LATE QING CHINA (READINGS IN TRANSLATION)

The latter years of China's Qing dynasty (1644-1911) bore witness to great political, economic, and social change. Periods of inter-ethnic tensions, famine, rebellion, war, and finally revolution all contributed to a rapidly changing landscape for the subjects of the Qing dynasty. As the socio-political reality changed, so too did the literary production that reflected and commented on that reality. In this class, we will read prominent works of fiction and non-fiction from the 19th and early 20th centuries in order to identify how cultural trends, literary preoccupations, and expectations for the social function of literature evolved alongside contemporary social and political shifts in tumultuous late Qing China. In particular, we will pay attention to the emergence of class, racial, ethnic, and nationalist consciousness; discourses of “modernity”; and the growing belief that popular fiction could serve as a tool for the education and reformation of dynastic subjects into potential future citizens.

Last Offered: Fall 2019

CHI 217 WRITING VOLATILITY AND PROCESSING CHANGE: A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURES OF CHINA, TAIWAN, AND HONG KONG IN THE TURBULENT TWENTIETH CENTURY (READINGS IN TRANSLATION)

This course takes a broad historical and social approach to Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong literatures in the twentieth century. Beginning with the transformative May Fourth and New Culture movements of 1919 and the early 1920s, we will move through the twentieth century as represented in (or set as the backdrop for) iconic and thought-provoking works of literature (including fiction, essays, and poetry) produced by some of the era’s most prominent writers. We will consider these pieces as subjective snapshots presenting different perspectives on and preoccupations with the complexity of life in particular social, political, and geographic contexts. Students will thus learn not only about major schools of thought and intellectual/literary trends over the course of the century, but the political and social events, periods of conflict and upheaval, and moments of transition that shaped China’s, Taiwan’s and Hong Kong’s respective political and intellectual trajectories during the same period.

Last Offered: Spring 2018

CHI 218 INTRO TO CHI POP CULTURE

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Last Offered: Fall 2019

CHI 219 ENCOUNTERING THE STRANGE

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Last Offered: Fall 2018

CHI 220 CHINESE LANDSCAPES: SPACE, PLACE AND TRAVEL

This course explores one of the world’s longest-running traditions of landscape representation. We'll consider such landscape genres as poetry, fiction, travel narrative, maps, painting, and photography, and consider their work across China’s long history of imperial expansion, colonization, and globalization. We'll also consider China’s places in thinking about landscape and travel in the West. All readings in English.

Last Offered: Fall 2014

CHI 221 LABORERS, SOJOURNERS, IMMIGRANTS: CHINESE JOURNEYS TO THE AMERICAS (19TH–20TH CENTURIES)

This course will focus on the wide variety of trajectories and circumstances that brought Chinese persons to sites throughout the Americas—e.g. the US, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Peru—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the vastly different realities that awaited them in different locations and in different eras. Together, we will look at the historic socio-economic factors that spurred these voyages, the experiences of those who underwent them, and the lasting impacts Chinese communities have had on the locations in which they arrived. We will also explore the development of immigration-related legislation in the Americas and its impacts on migrant and minority communities. Readings will be drawn from a variety of non-fictional sources (in English).

Last Offered: Spring 2020

CHI 222 GENDER SEXUALITY DESIRE LIT

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Last Offered: Spring 2020

CHI 223 MEMORY MEANING & FORGING NEW

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Last Offered: Fall 2019

CHI 230 CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART

Course explores the emergence of experimental and documentary art in China since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. We will consider how questions of the remainders of the past and new urban spaces, the shifting relations of writing and images, the politics of the body, and the changing of location of China in a global cultural economy have driven wide-ranging experiments with new materials, mediums, and exhibition spaces.

Last Offered: Fall 2016

CHI 231 ASIAN CALLIGRAPHY: HISTORY & PRACTICE I

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Last Offered: Fall 2018

CHI 232 ASIAN CALLIGRAPHY: HISTORY & PRACTICE II

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Last Offered: Spring 2018

CHI 233 CHINESE VISUAL CULTURE: MEDIUM AND MATERIALITY

This course explores the cultural politics of Chinese visual culture through an examination of its mediums. We’ll consider how in pre-20th century China paintings structured relations of gender and of inner and outer worlds; how the inscription of calligraphy on land mediated image and writing, nature and culture; and how the mass production of artworks intersected with conceptions of nature and social organization. We’ll then consider the new media culture of the 1920s-1930s, iconoclasm and idolatry during the Cultural Revolution, and the emergence of experimental and documentary art in recent decades. Our concern will be how mediums, as assemblages of images and surfaces with specific material qualities and practices function within real social spaces and create virtual spaces of representation and imagination.

Last Offered: Spring 2011

CHI 235 PHOTOGRAPHY IN EAST ASIA

Course explores the intertwining of photography, culture, and modernity in East Asia. Topics include the redefinition and transformation of photography within the visual cultures of 19-century Japan and early 20th-century China; and how in the photography of recent decades the border of art and documentary have become a site for engaging with urgent questions of place, displacement, the presence of the past, and an ever-changing world of images.

Last Offered: Spring 2017

CHI 237 CHINESE FILM

This course presents an overview of cinema in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1930s to the present, considering how cinema has served a means of representing and reshaping Chinese historical identities and everyday life at home and abroad. We will approach film as a mixed medium of narrative, image, and sound, and focus on how it represents the spectacle of modern China by mediating among recurring issues of modern (especially urban) life, the persistence of the past, the relations of place to Chinese and global culture, and the staging of these questions through issues of gender and ethnicity. Throughout, we will pay close attention to the interaction of themes, narrative genres (such as melodrama), formal techniques, and cultural and social context.

Last Offered: Fall 2017

CHI 267 AESTHETICS IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE ART

The historical development of the social, intellectual and cultural contexts of premodern Chinese aesthetics in artistic theory and practice.

CHI 274 CHINESE RELIGIONS

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Last Offered: Spring 2020

CHI 275 RELIGION & CHINESE SOCIETY

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Last Offered: Fall 2019

CHI 283 CHINA'S SILK ROAD

The Silk Road, or Silk Route, is a series of trade routes through regions of the Asian continent connecting Chang'an (today's Xi'an) in China, with Asia Minor and the Mediterranean. It extends over 4,000 miles across land and sea. Trade on the Silk Road was a significant factor in the development of the great civilizations of China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Indian subcontinent, and Rome, and helped to lay the foundations of the modern world. This course will examine the many civilizations that made up and communicated along these routes, from the eastward expansion of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE and the westward expansion of Han dynasty explorers in the 2nd century BCE into modern Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, to the expansion of the Mongol empire across China, Central Asia and Europe in the 13-14th centuries.

Last Offered: Fall 2013

CHI 390 SUPERVISED TEACHING

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Last Offered: Spring 2019

CHI 391 INDEPENDENT STUDY

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Last Offered: Spring 2020

CHI 392 PRACTICUM

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Last Offered: Fall 2019

CHI 394 INTERNSHIP

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