In this course, we will read excerpts from China’s greatest traditional novel, The Red Chamber Dream 紅樓夢, and analyse psychological and structural aspects of this text.
The main text has been downloaded from the internet, and we will compare it to some of the early manuscript versions.
For help in understanding the text, you may make use of two very good English translations: David Hawkes & John Minford’s The Story of the Stone, and Yang Hsien-yi & Gladys Yang’s A Dream of Red Mansions. The former is a literary masterpiece in its own right, while the latter is a very accurate translation.
Specialised dictionaries include 紅樓夢語言詞典 by 周定一and 紅樓夢大辭典 by 馮其庸.
If you read Norwegian, you may get help with the reading of chapter 1 from the introduction called Rumen 1a/1b.
All participants will be asked to present background material for the rest of the class, possibly including excerpts from the following works:
Edwards, Louise P. 1994: Men & Women in Qing China: Gender in The Red Chamber Dream. Leiden: Brill.
Epstein, Maram 2001: Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction.Cambridge: HarvardUniversityAsiaCenter.
Huang, Martin W. 2001: Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China. Cambridge: HarvardUniversityAsiaCenter.
Li, Waiyee 1993: Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lin, Shuen-Fu 1992: “Chia Pao-yü’s First Visit to the Land of Illusion: An Analysis of a Literary Dream in Interdisciplinary Perspective, CLEAR vol. 14 p. 77-106.