The dual concepts of space and place – and their contested definitions and overlaps – are becoming increasingly important perspectives in the humanities and the social sciences through which scholars examine literature, the arts, history, human psychology, and social relations. Very often, space and place are products of individual or collective creativity and are represented in literary and artistic works. This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to traditional Chinese literature, art, and culture through the angle of space and place. The course will introduce the theoretical underpinnings and major approaches to space and place in the humanities. It will guide the students to examine the ways in which different kinds of space and place are imagined, created, and structured through texts, images, and objects. It will encourage students to think across disciplines that are usually taught separately, including literature, art, thought, religion, and politics. It aims to arrive at a holistic understanding of life and society in traditional China, while grounding the discussion in in-depth and historically specific analyses.

The kinds of place and space examined in this course includes natural landscapes, cities, idyllic space, domestic space, gardens, and imaginary realms. The media explored will include poetry, prose, paintings, calligraphy, maps, carvings and murals, architecture, and artifacts. The material covered will follow a rough chronological order, and the overarching theme of the course will be to ask how complex ideas and relationships are conceptualised through the creation and structuring of space and place. Some of the questions explored in this course include: political centers and periphery; public and private spaces; gender relations; the relationship between the human individual and the cosmos; journeys and returns between different worlds; how do different ways of visualising space and places – such as horizontality, vertical depth, circularity and mirroring – affect our understanding of those places?