Read “1989: Tailoring Chinese Dissidents for American Consumption”.

The directors of the documentary film The Gate of Heavenly Peace “join a battle” for the meaning of June 1989, writes Claire Ren in this Perspectives on the Humanities essay. In writing a critical response to the film, Claire joins this battle too. Driven by her fascination with the film’s complexity and her skepticism of Western reports about the events, Claire developed a research inquiry which situated the film in the context of American media narratives. Her inquiry progressed through cycles of immersion and refinement: from an in-depth reading of the film to a project proposal, from hours of research to an annotated bibliography, from several drafts to a submitted essay. The final submission is a powerful act of criticism, through which Claire adds her voice to the debate over the film’s significance and legacy.

—Amy Becker, Director of and Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program

Read “The Participation of Impoverished Peoples in Placebo-Controlled Pharmaceutical Trials: Scientific Innovation or Neocolonial Exploitation?”.

This essay represents an ambitious attempt to deepen our thinking about a significant debate in medical ethics. Madison submitted this paper as her final research project in Writing as Inquiry (Writing II). The assignment asked students to use either Kant or Mill to enhance our thinking about a contemporary moral problem or ethical debate. It also required them to work with a range of sources to advance their chosen line of inquiry. Madison accomplishes both of these tasks rather effectively. Her use of source material is particularly impressive as she develops and deepens her analysis. I also admire her attempt to adapt (rather than merely apply) a Kantian framework to help us see this debate from a new perspective. Taking up an approach, as Madison attempts here, is one of the more challenging moves we all face as academic writers.

—Paul Woolridge, Lecturer in the Writing Program

Read “A New Dimension of Chinese Identity: An Emerging Live House Culture in China”.

Cindy Wang’s lively essay, written for her Spring 2017 Writing as Inquiry (Writing I) class with Dr. Emily Murphy, takes as its object of investigation China’s increasingly popular live house culture. What is happening in this particular community of musicians and their fans–who wear Hanfu and sing about lamb noodles–and how do these happenings relate to larger questions of national identity and globalization? Using theoretical texts from literature and the social sciences, Cindy argues that Chinese live house culture offers a new way of constructing Chinese identity, one that is both local and global. This is precisely the kind of intellectual project we hope our NYU Shanghai students will pursue: What do they encounter within and beyond campus, and how do the theorists they read for our courses help them to better understand these encounters? In “A New Dimension of Chinese Identity: An Emerging Live House Culture in China,” Cindy skillfully addresses these questions on the page.

—Jennifer Tomscha, Associate Director of and Lecturer in the Writing Program

Read “Making It New: Ezra Pound’s ‘Luminous’ Mythmaking of China”.

I congratulate Bai Xiao on the inclusion of her essay “Making It New: Ezra Pound’s ‘Luminous’ Mythmaking of China” for publication in our writing journal. She wrote this essay for the Perspectives on the Humanities course titled “Sino-Western Literary Exchanges” that I taught in the Fall of 2016. It is an extremely ambitious project, stretching over Pound’s entire career as a poet-translator, from his initial encounter with the Fenollosa manuscripts to his tragic years after World War II, and covering a stunning array of texts and ideas, from Cathay through the Da xue or, as Pound rendered it, The Great Digest to the Cantos, from the nature of the Chinese language through the social and economic problems in the interwar period to the moral and political teachings of Confucius. In ranging back and forth among this plethora of materials, the essay deserves credit for not losing sight of its argument: namely, Pound’s China is an imaginary construct invented as a cure for the crises facing the Western world in his day. I recommend the essay for its many insights, its exuberant ambition, and its value as a case study of cultural exchange.

—Chen Lin, Lecturer in the Writing Program