FIRST reading journal due

Reading Journal Assignment: Due dates October 23rd/Nov 27th/Jan 15^th. Students are expected to submit 3 reading journals. Preferred style is CMS.

Please submit the Journal to the lecturer’s email address maran@lit.nagoya-u.ac.jp with the subject “CFA reading journal I/II/III”. I’d send out confirmation email once your assignment is received. Late submission is not accepted unless emergency happens.

Format

Include the following information at the top of each assignment:

Your Name Course Title Submission Date Reading Journal Essay # [you should write either 1 or 2 here; not just #!!!]             Title of article  (CMS format)

In a reading journal, you do NOT have to review all the topics covered in the previous weeks. Try to focus on ONE specific topic/argument (could be any one of these: cinema of attractions/spectacle/mise-en-scene etc.). 

You should engage with at least 2 reading(s) as listed in our syllabus—1 of which MUST be the required readings. Secondary resources are welcome. Put them in the Notes/Bibliography per CMS. 

You are expected to review, evaluate and even critique certain theoretical concepts (such as the keywords proposed by scholars) and/or arguments (much detailed explanations). Besides paraphrasing the authors' ideas/notions/concepts/arguments, you should be able to present your own interpretation and viewpoints. 
NOTE: for undergraduate students, further relevant analysis of film shots/scenes/aesthetics/styles etc. will be welcomed but not a must.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to write me.

Examples for critical reviews that we expect to read from a Reading Journal might look like this (courtesy our current MA students):

1. In this 2007 essay by Kenneth Chan, he argues that Tsai utilizes what he describes as the cinematic aesthetics of lingering to preserve nostalgia from becoming part of the transnational capitalist structures and networks of cultural consumption, which Chan believes, are implied by the film’s engagement with Dragon Gate Inn and the embedded nature of the wu xia pian genre. Chan’s emphasis lies on the way in which the transnational capitalist consumption (metonymy of wu xia pian) is disrupted by the cinematic aesthetics of lingering that in this case, exercises a place’s politics of local-ness.  

2.  

            In citing Robert Spencer, Felicia Chan highlights in her introduction to Cosmopolitan Cinema: Imagining the Cross-cultural in East Asian Film that “the value of cosmopolitanism lies in its function as a critical framework….rather than as a theme or an outlook expressed within the work” (2). This is because, according to Chan, film as text is a very complicated object embedded within various social, economic, and psychological contexts: for example, beyond the cultural memories/histories within films themselves, the act of going to the theater is wrapped in previous instances of film-going (4); cinema is not limited to the locality of such a single spectator’s experience, as it at times crosses multiple borders in finding (or targeting) other audiences (5); and furthermore, surrounding an individual film text are established stars and genres, as well as the film’s distribution and exhibition, in other words, the material and industrial contexts of its creation (14). What all these aspects of cinema point to is that cinema can act as a very useful tool in interrogating cosmopolitanism, in seeking to answer above all the question which Chan poses: “who might have a stake in these stories and why?” (16).

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