Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee
Due at the beginning of class on Tuesday April 1.
In lecture and section we have been talking about how many works of fiction center on raising issues of social and political anxiety and then resolving them. The example from lecture was the Monkey King—the hugely popular super-hero of Chinese myth—who, in rambunctiously rebelling against Heaven, captured the frustration that many average peasants must have felt regarding the arrogance of ruling elites. Of course, by the end of the story the Monkey King is tamed and becomes an obedient servant in the heavenly bureaucracy, but along the way he proves himself far more powerful than most of the Gods in Heaven and takes great pleasure in making them look like arrogant fools. So the Monkey King story raises several basic social and political problems: huge socio-economic inequalities, governmental incompetence, and the hypocrisy of a government system that claims to be strictly meritocratic but clearly is not.
Detective stories also center on raising social and political anxieties. In the end good triumphs, evil is punished, justice is served, and the social order is restored (until the next episode). In late imperial Chinese fiction the resolution is inevitably a happy, proper, and just one, not only because audiences like happy endings but also because the Ming and Qing governments and elites were quite wary of stories that implied that immorality might go unpunished; morality was, after all, the basis that justified imperial rule and elite authority.
With that long introduction, your assignment is:
Write a brief essay (no longer than 1500 words) discussing how one specific set of social, political or moral anxieties/issues is raised and resolved in the Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. In addition to using the Judge Dee book, you must also use at least 2 other primary texts from the Ebrey Sourcebook to support and clarify your assertion that the social/political/ethical/economic issue you are identifying in the novel was indeed a concern of general importance in Chinese society and history.
To note quotes and citations from the course readings you can simply write the name of the book and the page # in parenthesis, for instance: (Judge Dee, p. 35) or (Sourcebook, p. 40). Use only texts assigned in this class for this paper.
In evaluating your essays we will be looking for the following:
Is the description and interpretation of the Judge Dee text accurate and convincing?
Are the primary sources you have chosen from the Sourcebook well chosen and interpreted in their proper context?
Does the student have a good sense of how a reader in late imperial China might have thought about these issues and the stories?
And of course, is the paper written clearly, has it grasped and articulated an issue of significance in Chinese history/culture, does it have a clear, well-argued and well-supported thesis.
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