Taiwan Lecture Series - Sommersemester 2015
HS/OS Modern, OS Transcultural Studies: Taiwan Lecture Series 2015: Taiwan Culture and Society (Taiwan Lecture Series) This semester’s Taiwan Lecture Series will be focused on Taiwan’s literature and culture in a global context. It will consist of lectures by senior scholars such as Yeh Wen-hsin (Berkeley), who will speak on Taiwan historiography and poetry, Paola Zamperini (Northwestern) who will speak on Taiwan film, as well as junior scholars such as Chang I-wen (UCLA) who will speak on Taiwan dance culture, more specifically, Salsa in Taiwan. The course will be taught in several blocks, usually on Wednesdays either at 11-13 or 16-18 and it will be focused between May and July. A first meeting will take place on April 15th, 11-13. |
Joining the virtual classroom:
"Enter as a Guest" on the following website:![]() |
Please note: lecture videos work best with Firefox
Rough Outline of the Sessions:
Introduction Date: 15.04.2015 |
|
Reading: Paola Zamperini: Reading Through "A Chronicle of Changing Clothes" by Zhang Ailang Date: 06.05.2015 |
Reading material |
Lecture: Paola Zamperini: Fashioning the “Chinese” Past in Taiwanese cinema at the turn of the Twenty-first Century Date: 13.05.2015 |
Reading material & lecture record
|
Reading: YEH, Wen-hsin Date: 03.06.2015 |
Reading material Lecture 1 (17.06.)
Lecture 2 (18.06.)
|
Reading: Chang-I-wen "Salsa in Taiwan I" Date: 10.06.2015 |
Reading material
|
Lecture: YEH, Wen-hsin: "Of Raw and Cooked Savages: Taiwan Narrative Poetry on the “Aboriginals" (Selections from Lian Heng's Taiwan Shisheng 台灣詩乘)" Date: 17.06.2015 |
Reading material
|
Lecture: Chang I-Wen "Salsa in Taiwan I" Date: 17.06.2015 |
Chapter 1: “How to theorize Social Dance: Imagining Desire and Flirtation in Salsa” serves as the ontological and theoretical foundation for my research. I draw on phenomenology to indicate how distance, relationality, affinity, solidarity, and communication work in partner dance. Reading material
|
Lecture: YEH Wen-hsin: “Shipwrecked: the Rover and the Coming of Modernity in Taiwan” Date: 18.06.2015 |
Reading material
|
Reading: Chang I-wen Salsa in Taiwan: Chapters 2 - 3 Date: 01.07.2015 |
Reading material ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Lecture: Chang-I-wen Salsa in Taiwan II Date: 01.07.2015 |
Chapter 2: “How to Conform in Taiwan and How to Break the Rules” focuses on the bodily discipline of comportment in the Taiwanese society. It sets up a genealogy of corporeal conformity and rule breaking in Taiwanese dance culture. I explore the idea of a normative, historically rooted, and continually changing Chinese/Taiwanese body. I trace the transformations in the three ideal mainstream bodies: the Confucian body, the modern body, and the combative national body. Reading material ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Lecture: WU, Mingyi: Readings Date: 13.07.2015 |
Reading material
|
Lecture: Corey Byrnes: “Trashy Literature: Oceanic Waste in Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes” Date: 15.07.2015 |
In his 2011 novel, The Man with the Compound Eyes (Fuyan ren 複眼人), Wu Ming-yi imagines the existence of a massive island of trash floating across the Pacific on a collision course with Taiwan. When it washes ashore as a series of massive waves, it transforms the coast into a wasteland that thrusts into sight the material unconscious of modern life—the trash that is the inevitable and essential foundation of consumer culture. By focusing on The Man with the Compound Eyes, this paper analyzes waste, both as a material product (rather than by-product) essential to the functioning of global capitalism and as a literary figure that traces the hidden network of flows, exchanges, migrations and invasions that constitute local, national and global identities. It also explores how the paired threats of trash/pollution and rising sea levels are beginning to generate a new mode of “island poetics,” one based on a shared experience of precarity in the face of climate change. Reading material
Lecture Record: |
Lecture: CHANG I-WEN Salsa in Taiwan III Date: 15.07.2015 |
Chapter 3: “How to Flirt with Global Citizenship in International Salsa Sites” examines how Taiwanese salsa practitioners flirt with salsa dance as a foreign product, a foreign cultural imagination, and a concept of the Western modernity. Reading material
Lecture Record: |
Final Discussion Date: 22.07.2015 |
|