This course examines Chinese literature, film, and culture from the late seventies to the contemporary era, with a focus on the expression and representation of emotion and affect. We will explore the emotions explicitly manifested or addressed in a variety of cultural artifacts (fiction, poetry, biography, documentary, film, and intellectual discourse), while also identifying previously unacknowledged affective structures implicitly at work during the country’s postsocialist transition. It will address topics such as humanist testimony, guilt and shame, memory and trauma, sentimentalism and neoliberalism, mourning, nostalgia, melancholy, religious feeling, loyalism, fear and resentment.