Topic: Chinese Narrative Art
This course is an investigation into story-telling in Chinese painting: illustrations of historical
events, biographies, Buddhist tales, narrative poetry, personal memoirs, and love stories.  Often in
the form of wall paintings or of long horizontal scrolls (hand scrolls), the scenes of these
illustrated narratives follow one another in something like a cinematic dramatization.
This material presents many questions and invites many possible approaches.  What texts were
illustrated, and what portions of those texts; and why and how did htese selections come about?
What is the visual rhetoric of extended narrative illustrations, with devices for suggesting elapsed
time or highlighting details?  How did these selections and solutions and modes of representation
change over time, and why?  And so on.  The course will offer an introduction to a range of
Chinese narrative texts and pictures and related issues, while concentrating on a selection of key
examples for special study and analysis.
A560 meets with A360 for two lecture-discussion sessions each week; in addition, A560
students will meet for a separate session every two weeks (time to be arranged) to discuss special
readings in recent scholarship, issues and approaches, and research projects and metholodogies.
Graduate students prepare a research project to be presented orally at the end of the semester and
also handed in.  The course may be taken for seminar credit; see Dr. Nelson if you are interested
in doing so.
Previous course work in Chinese art is not a necessity.