The I-Ching to Xi Jinping

Got another syllabus done today. The space around my chair is knee-deep in books.  I decided to stay up last night late and finish this off and now, having submitted it, I’m glad I did.  Unlike the syllabus, I rewrote earlier in the week, this was something I had to do from scratch, for the first time and it called upon things so many things I have strong opinions about. 

The class topic is one that I’ve wanted to teach, in one way or another, for more than two decades now: the history of Chinese Civilization.  That isn’t precisely what the course I inherited was entitled, but in as much as we were supposed to cover the I-Ching to Xi Jinping, the broad sweep would necessarily take up much of what we were supposed to explore.

I had a core text I’d use, a condescend version of the Cambridge History series (I have a dozen of the big ones up over my head, behind me.)  And then, what do you do to supplement, to bring the Han Dynasty to life?  How do you make the Song memorable to people who’ve never heard of it?  I kept staring up at my “China” shelf that has about four-hundred books lined up on it and I began to filter for whatever primary sources I could find.  No, we weren’t gonna have time to read all “The Water Margin”, but let’s get a taste of Sagacious Lu, drunk at the monastery.  You need to read through thirteen hundred pages of “The Dream of the Red Chamber” before the house falls suddenly in the final book, but we could at least sample Wang Xifeng making a suitor's life miserable, when we discuss the Qing.

Being selective is harder when we reach the last two hundred years.  That is what most of those books up there focus on.  What is the best text to profile the insanity of the Cultural Revolution?  What text will humanize Mao Zedong?  And by the time I thought I was done, I realized I needed to make sure there were women representative of each period as well.  Wu Zetian, and Cixi, sure.  But who to profile for the Ming?  Who, besides the leader’s wives, do we discuss during the revolutionary period?     

I read it over about seven times before I said it was finally “done.”   All the great novels and remarkable primary sources that didn’t make the cut got added to the “recommended” section which I suppose every professor knows is indulgently aspirational.  Twenty-two years ago, I was fortunate enough to cover this period in two courses during a year at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  I imagined culling through boxes in my basement back in New York and magically finding the syllabus from those two courses, wondering how they would compare to what I’ve done on my own after all these years.

If you are a student in this course, that has yet to be taught, and you have come upon this blog somehow, firstly, welcome.  Glad to know you're a reader.  Secondly, yes, I know there is a lot of reading for our course.  And it is all worth it and it was all chosen with great love and care to gradually and unconditionally blow your mind.  

Friday, 03/16/18