Comparative Literature

This course provides a study of Korean famous prose written in Chinese characters. Intellectual and historical Korean writing is based on Chinese Characters. The course focuses on reading and exploring prose in the original language. However, since students may not be familiar with Chinese characters, the lecture focuses on reading the original text, but also exploring the text’s originality.

The brutal struggle between free will of humanity and historical force has long been a controversial and intriguing subject in the discussions of literature. The point lies not in which side wins eventually, but in exploring what happens in the process of struggle. Viewed from the perspective of literary development, it is quite clear that each different literary movement in postwar Taiwan provides its own unique understanding of the relationship between man and history, between social agency and historical transformation, and ultimately between history and fiction. This course is divided into four parts each dealing with specific historical issues or events. The first deals with how historical figures, such as Song Qingling and Chen Yi, are treaed in fiction. The second part looks at history and politics. The third part discusses how past experiences have been represented from different ideological points of view by different writers. Finally, the course takes a close look at how writers explain the failure (or success) of certain social movements after they have long perished. In short, all the four parts try to explore the complicated interactions among history, human experience, and literary mind.

This course invites students to do a thorough reflection on what it means to be an educated human being. Starting from the classical concept of the artes liberales, it explores the different forms this concept has taken on throughout Western history, such as the humanistic ideal of the "homo universalis," the 19th century concept of Bildung, and the late 20th and 21st-century ideal of "global citizenship." The course also examines the most important challenges which liberal education has faced throughout its long history: e.g. utilitarianism (Plato against the sophists), scholasticism (Lorenzo Valla’s critique of medieval "obscurantism"), and the challenge posed by the 19th-century concept of "professional science." Moreover, the course explores the surprising ways in which ideals of liberal education have spread by means of literature, e.g. through the "Bildungsroman" (H. Hesse), the "epic theatre" (Bertolt Brecht) and even the modern detective (Sherlock Holmes). Lastly, the course invites students to write a conclusive statement on the value of liberal education by asking students to rethink how liberal education has formed their character in previous years and how it is likely to bear on life choices that are upcoming in the future.