In this class we will read poetry and prose from the second half of the sixth century, with a focus on poetry and prose by members of the southern diaspora after the traumatic event of the Hou Jing Rebellion, but we will also examine the “western diaspora”—the Northern Qi writers who were captured by the Zhou conquest forces and sent from Ye to Chang’an. Through the reading of these writings, this course asks this question: how literature, especially shi poetry, represents traumatic experience, and, more specifically, how is poetry made to articulate an experience that has rarely been represented before?