ASIAN-215 Course Archive Posts

Taiwanese Opera By Tiffany Lay As I have been watching the opera videos for class and doing the reading assignments. I have also been sharing with my family my studies and it has come to my attention that Taiwanese Opera (歌仔戲) is also a form of opera that is of…

Yue Opera’s Ability to Cater to My Taste Loriya Thao As a female and modern reader/audience, there are several aspects of Yue Opera that are able to cater to my taste and some aspects that don’t. This being my first interaction with Yue Opera, the aspect that stood out to…

Tang Xianzu: Connecting Three Realms with a Bee By Brenda Schatz In the Cyril Birch translation version of the Peony Pavilion: Mudan Ting (Tang Xianzu), there is a legend of love and longing, where a consummate dream of passion is interrupted; yet it is so potent that it manifests through…

Important Values in Yue Opera By Carmen Huang A very important value reflected in Yue Opera is the empowerment of women through their ways of circumventing traditions and boundaries in realms that suppress their agency. In “Butterfly Lovers,” for example, Zhu Yingtai manages to convince her father to allow her to…

To You, What Moral Values Reflected in the Yue Operas that We Have Watched are Still Valid and Important to Today’s Society? By Sarah Eisner In several of the plays we have been presented with, in opera form as well as the ballad versions, we have seen many of the…

Should Traditional Masterpieces be Filmed as a Movie or TV Series? By Qianyun Wu Should traditional masterpieces be filmed as a movie or TV series? I have seen the new TV episodes of Dream of the Red Chamber and The Romance of West Chamber which are both occupies an important…

Yue Opera Version of The Peony Pavilion By Colgan Powell The Yue Opera version of “The Peony Pavilion” was the first adaptation that I have seen and I did not consider it “modern” in the sense of what I think most people consider modern. I thought the approach to be pretty…

Qing: Falling Love with the Concept of Love in Contemporary Society By Xiru Zhao Tang Xianzu writes “Love comes nowhere, but once involved in it, people will never come back.” In The Peony Pavilion, Bridal Du’s love seems to me just come from nowhere. She went the Peony Pavilion for…

Supernatural Beings, Mortals, and Relationships Between the Two By  Miranda Honigberg As a massive fan of Western mythology, I have found it is rare to see a human marrying a supernatural being in their stories. It is much more common for them have affairs with each other, or for a supernatural…