Cities and Everyday Life in Chinese Cult

Italo Calvino's imagined Marco Polo cautions in Invisible Cities (1972): "Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased." How, then, can we retrieve from the vanished past the lived experiences of men and women in their built environments? This seminar invites you on a tour of a constellation of cities—as both physical sites and literary creations—from China’s pre-imperial period to the twentieth century, engaging textual, visual, and cinematic media that have shaped, and been shaped by, the palimpsests of urban life in flux.