The above three passages merely provide glimpses of the fast, radical and chaotic changes happening around us and the 'seemingly' glorious and simple days of the past. They also pose pertinent and difficult questions about identity, trauma and globalization. How do we as literary majors deal with these questions in this world of radical changes? And how have "they" (artists, literary writers and critical theorists) tried to do it?

This course has two goals:
1. doing literary criticism as a professional critic (see below);
2. critical engagement in the following questions with the stimuli of their theoretical and artistic configurations:
I. From New Criticism to New Historicism (6 wk): Identity and History

What is Identity and how is it related to history and trauma?
How does a text produce its meanings about identity and history both through form and content?
What are the different assumptions about text, identity and history in New Criticism and New Historicism?

II. Post-Colonialism (3 wk): Identity, Race and Nation

What is colonialism? What does it do to one's sense of racial or national identity?
How do the colonized resist colonization? Is de-colonization possible?
How does a post-colonial nation (like Taiwan) deal with its national history (esp. its traumas) and national identity?
III. Postmodernism (3 wk): History and Globalization
In the postmodern age, why is historiography challenged while there have been an excessive attempts at telling and making histories?
How do postmodern fictions and texts reconstruct history and trauma while acknowledging its impossibility?
How has globalization (especially cultural globalization) impacted on our sense of identities?

IV. Problematizing Identity, Trauma and Globalization (4 wk): To wrap up on all the complicated theories and issues we will have dealt with at this point, we will ask:

Of all the ways of constructing histories and identities by the theorists and the cultural workers, which do we support or find useful to ourselves?
How are colonialism, trauma and globalization interconnected with each other? How do we position ourselves in relation to them?

The areas I will select my examples are:

-- Stories and (excerpts of) novels about history since the 19th century;
-- one or two examples of New Historicist treatments of Shakespeare;
-- Trauma narratives of Hiroshima and Vietnam war
-- Modern and Contemporary English stories about race relations
-- National allegories or Historical Films of Taiwan's New Cinema
-- Contemporary global culture and writings about Chinese diaspora.

Goal I: "Doing" Literary Criticism
In dealing with literary and cultural texts, we need to know first what literary criticism is. Literary criticism is different from literary appreciation: the latter involves expressions of your feelings and pleasure in reading, your likes and dislikes of a text, while the former, as a formal training for literature majors, requires both literary sensibility and critical thinking. In other words, literary criticism consists of careful analysis of literary texts with a conscious use of some critical frameworks and methods and an active engagement in their critical issues. (For further details on what literary criticism is, please view this animation. http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/video/animation/lit1.swf)
Here I emphasize 'doing' because we will not only deal with theoretical and literary texts, but also see how their ideas can be practiced in their worlds-and ours. In other words, we will try to improve our abilities in:

1. analyzing literary texts from more than one critical perspective;
2. responding critically to the issues raised by the chosen theoretical, literary and cultural texts;
3. placing, with the help of some critical theories, literature and the issues involved in a larger context, such as those of the texts' contemporary society, our society and our lives.