Genre Classification of Nanking (2007)

documentary (nonfiction film that “documents” an aspect of reality, usually for educational purposes or to maintain a historical record)

essay film (documentary film with an explicit argument or specific point-of-view)

Saving Private Ryan (1998) Gladiator (2000)

Braveheart (1995)

Genre Classification of City of Life and Death (2009)

historical period drama / historical epic (often just called a “period piece” or a “period drama”)

docudrama (films that try to accurately recreate a historical event or person’s life)

Two films on the Nanking Massacre in formal conversation:

!  The politics of each film’s recreation of res gestae

!  The varying degrees of reenactment (Hollywood actors reading archival documents vs. dramatic reenactment)

" Prof. Hart’s observation about Nanking’s ‘Brechtian’ use of defamiliarization/alienation effects

!  Production values of each genre

!  Intention (education vs. entertainment, logos vs. pathos)

!  Integration of primary sources (postcards in City of Life and Death, letters, newsreels, photographs, historical film footage, and interviews with survivors in Nanking)

Primary Sources vs. Secondary Sources

Primary sources are original records created at the time historical events occurred or well after events in the form of memoirs and oral histories.

•  They include letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, newspapers, speeches, interviews, memoirs, documents produced by government agencies, photographs, audio recordings, moving pictures or video recordings, research data, and objects or artifacts such as works of art, maps, buildings, tools, and weapons.

•  These sources serve as the raw material to interpret the past, and when they are used along with previous interpretations by historians, they provide the resources necessary for historical research.

Secondary sources are works that interpret or analyze after the event has occurred, often based on an examination of primary sources.

•  Secondary sources can be for a general audience (Wikipedia, documentary films and television, nonfiction written for the public)

•  Secondary sources can also be academic (published in monographs or peer reviewed academic journals indexed on databases like Jstor and Project Muse)

Research Project Prompt

Write an essay that analyzes the humanistic significance of a cultural artifact related to war. Your essay must pose and answer humanistic research questions about your artifact and must engage critically with at least 4-6 scholarly monographs or peer-reviewed articles.

Artifact = primary source

Scholarly monograph or peer-reviewed articles = secondary source

Primary Sources (“Artifacts”) from the Nanking Massacre

An article on the “Contest to kill 100 people using a sword” published in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun (13 December 1937)

Primary Sources (“Artifacts”) from the Nanking Massacre

Photograph of a Chinese POW about to be beheaded by a Japanese officer with a shin gunto (July 1938).

Photographer unknown, first published in Harold Timperley’s The Japanese Atrocities in China (1938), one of the first journalistic accounts of the Nanking Massacre for Western audiences

Primary Sources (“Artifacts”) from the Nanking Massacre

Telegram written by journalist Harold Timperley describing the atrocities (17 January 1938)

Primary Sources (“Artifacts”) from the Nanking Massacre

Memorial stone and two sculptures at the Memorial for Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Forces of Aggression located in Jiangdongmen, Nanjing, near a site where thousands of bodies were buried, called a "pit of ten thousand corpses."

Secondary Source on the Nanking Massacre

Historian Iris Chang with her bestselling study, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (Basic Books, 1997)

How do I start looking for artifacts/primary sources related to my own research interests?

1) Databases to Get You Started: Primary Sources (UCI Libraries)http://libguides.lib.uci.edu/content.php?pid=42073&sid=1347202

2) Using Primary Sources on the Web (American Library Association)http://www.ala.org/rusa/sections/history/resources/pubs/usingprimarysources

" Review both of these pages before next week, as on Wednesday we will be evaluating possible artifacts for your research project in class.

Midterm on Monday, May 4You must purchase and bring a Blue Book to class. These can be bought at the UCI Bookstore. Do not write on your Blue Book before you arrive, as you may exchange with another student for security.

Midterm will last for fifty minutes total. You may take as long as you like on the short answer and essay sections, however both must be completed in the time allotted.

I. Short answer (60% Approx. 30 minutes)Answer SIX questions in a few sentences each. Be sure to respond to each question directly with specific information from the readings, films, lectures, and discussions. On this exam, there will be a selection of five questions (you choose three to answer) as well as three mandatory questions:

!  Two questions will based on short film clips and you will be asked to identify the film title, year, director, and comment on technical features of the segment.

!  One question will be about Ruth Klüger’s Friday Forum

II. Essay question (40% Approx. 30 minutes)Answer ONE of two questions in a substantial, organized, and thoughtful essay that takes account of each part of the question and supports its thesis with specific information from the readings, films, lectures,and discussions. Your answer should cover at least two blue book pages.

How to prepare for the midterm?

!  Make sure that you have carefully read all of the texts in the class to date this quarter (including all of the shorter texts from the HCC Guide and Reader with special emphasis on Ruth Klüger) and watched Full Metal Jacket, Coming Home, Invisible War, and Nanking. City of Life and Death and Landscapes of Memories are not mandatory viewing, but you may certainly reference them in your essay.

!  Carefully review your lecture notes and Prof. Burke and Hart’s Powerpoints. Think about key concepts and their own theses/interpretive claims about the material. Carefully review your notes from section, especially the “key concepts” that we have discussed.

!  Review the study questions (both on the section website and provided by Prof. Hart). While they won’t be in that exact form on the midterm, those are certainly “fair game” subjects for short-answer questions (and they will help you review the material for your essay question as well).

!  Think about the genre of each reading and film we have encountered, and how you would characterize the formal/technical strategies of each reading and film (i.e., What is the rhetorical orientation of this text/film? What effect does it have on its audience? What about its “madeness” is unique or interesting?)