This course provides an overview of Chinese martial arts fiction and film from earliest times to the present day. The focus will be on the close-reading of literary, art-historical, cinematic and game texts, but will also include discussion of the significance of these works against their broader historical and social background. Topics to be discussed: the pleasure of reading/watching/playing violence, the relationship between violence and the law, gender ambiguity and the woman warrior, the imperial and (trans)national order of martial arts cinema, and the moral and physical economy of vengeance.

This course tells the epic story of the people, ideas, and institutions that made the first Chinese empires, ca. third century BCE to the first century BCE. The course looks at the rise and fall of the Qin empire as well as the way Qin institutions and ideas reverberated through the succeeding Han dynasty--and beyond. Course will cover most recent archeological materials and excavated texts (in translation), including ongoing excavations of the terracotta warriors, funerary art, excavated legal codes, legal cases, religious and philosophical texts, and much more. Finally, we ask: did the Qin empire ever end?