Assignment

Response Paragraph: Thunderstorm

Watch the video clip from a film version (with English subtitles) of Cao Yu's tragic drama, Thunderstorm, directed by Sun Daolin in the 1990s. The clip shows the ending of act four when the real identities and relationships among main characters are inadvertently revealed.

What role does thunderstorm play in this scene? How are the themes of Fate and morbid hierarchical family order represented? Compare Thunderstorm to other works we studied (such as Zhang's Raise the Red Lantern or Kawabata's Thousand Cranes). If you were to name one common theme of turn-of-the-century East Asian literature, what would that be and why?

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