About the course
chingen 10sc | Complit 10sc
The 2006 film Pursuit of Happyness, an unabashed celebration of the American Dream, was enthusiastically embraced by Chinese audiences. It seems that the pursuit of happiness has become truly globalized, even as the American Dream is slipping away for many. Are Americans still convinced that their conception of happiness is a self-evident truth and a universal gospel? Is there anything that Americans might learn about what it means to live a good life from not only the distant past, but also cultures in which happiness is conceptualized and sought after very differently? This course takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the question of happiness and invites undergraduate students to reflect on its relationship to virtue, wisdom, health, love, prosperity, justice, and solidarity. Giving equal weight to Chinese and Western sources, it seeks to defamiliarize some of the most deeply held ideas and values in American society through the lens of cross-cultural inquiry.
During the summer, students will read a selection of novels, memoirs, and reflections by philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. In September, we will review these texts and place them alongside movies, short fiction, news stories, and social commentary while we interrogate the chimera of happiness. In addition to daily seminars, we will experiment with meditation, short-form life writing, and service learning with participation of local elders. Furthermore, there will be at least three guest speakers, including a prominent Confucian philosopher and a Stanford alum now running a happiness-related enterprise.
Instructor Bio
Haiyan Lee grew up in an impoverished rural market town in Mao’s China and immigrated to the United States as the spouse of an American graduate student. Her biggest cultural shock was the realization that she had to decide for herself what to do with her life. She embarked on this rite of passage with both trepidation and relish, beginning with choosing to study literature in graduate school. Now 20 years later, she has both lived and observed the American Dream as both a dewy-eyed immigrant and a critical citizen-scholar. Meanwhile, back in China, after three decades of reform and catching up, the Chinese economy has surged to No. 2 in the world and the Chinese people have been urged by the government to pursue the “Chinese Dream.” With her long-standing interest in the study of emotion and popular culture as well as the modern transformations of identity and value, she joined a group of sociologists and philosophers in a large-scale, comparative study of the problem of happiness in China. This course grew out of her engagement with the question of what it means to pursue happiness in a secular, technologized, and multi-polar world.
