Courses
Course offerings and times are subject to change.
Autumn 2009
Undergraduate only
EALC 10800 Introduction to East Asian Civilization-1, China
G.Alitto
MWF 10:30-11:20
EALC 16800 Art of Asia: Japan.
C. Foxwell
This course surveys the arts of the Japanese archipelago through the focused study of selected major sites and artifacts. We consider objects in their original contexts and in the course of transmission and reinterpretation across space and time. How did Japanese visual culture develop in the interaction with objects and ideas from China, Korea, and the West? Topics include prehistoric artifacts, the Buddhist temple, imperial court culture, the narrative handscroll, the tea ceremony, folding screens, and early modern prints.
MW 3:00-4:20
EALC 1710 Chinese Calligraphy and Civilization
P. Foong
If the invention of writing is regarded a mark of early civilization, the practice of calligraphy is a unique and sustaining aspect of Chinese culture. This course will introduce concepts central to the study of Chinese calligraphy from pre-history to the present. For discussion: materials and techniques, aesthetics and communication, copying/reproduction/schema and creativity/expression/personal style, public values and the scholar’s production, orthodoxy and eccentricity, official scripts and the transmission of elite culture, wild and magic writing by “mad” monks.
MW 1:30-2:50
EALC 25305 The Dream of the Red Chamber and Late-Imperial Chinese Culture
Y. He
The main focus of this course will be a careful reading of Cao Xueqin’s Honglou meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber). In the process, we will examine some of the range of texts, images, and issues across various literary and cultural genres in late-imperial China that this immensely complex novel draws on. The hope is that in doing so we will gain a deeper appreciation both of the novel itself and of the culture of late-imperial China. We will read about and discuss such topics as gender, erotic desire, relations between text and commentary, the world of theater and performance, as well as dimensions of material culture and theories of medicine and illness. All readings are in English.
TTh1:30-2:50
Undergraduate/Graduate
EALC 20102/30102 Skills and Methods in Chinese Painting History
P. Foong
Prior knowledge of East Asian art required; knowledge of Chinese or Japanese recommended. This course aims to provide groundwork skills in conducting primary research in the study of Chinese painting history. We emphasize the study of early periods, especially the Song and Yuan Dynasties. We consider implications in the material investigation of medium (e.g., silk, paper, mounting, ink, color) in conjunction with relevant sinological tools. We discuss connoisseurship practices and issues of authenticity and provenance (i.e., identification and judging of the authenticity of seals and inscriptions).
Th 1:30-4:20
EALC 22025/32025 Japanese Love Stories
J. Yoshida
Quite a few Japanese writers and filmmakers have dipped their pen or camera in a popular genre of love story. Their stories often deploy the high concept of “pure love” (jun’ai) as a disguised form of social protests. By analyzing each individual love story in conjunction with its broader social and cultural problems, this seminar tries to articulate historical specificity of Japanese love story as a genre and its multiple ideological ramifications. A working hypothesis here is that: love story might have been one of the most effective and slippery ways of making sense of historical contradictions of modern Japan. Stories and films to be assigned are: Ozaki Koyo’s Demon Gold, Higuchi Ichiyo’s Takekurabe, Soseki’s And Then, Tanizaki’s Naomi, Katsuei Yuasa’s Kan’nani, Mizoguchi’s Sisters of the Gion, Tachihara’s Wind and Stone, Oshima’s Street of Love and Hope, Sadao Yukisada’s GO, Kenji Uchida’s Stranger in Myself. Supplementary theoretical readings will be added. All readings are in English. Key topics to be dealt with at some length are: confession as a system, identity as a discursive construct, social impacts of mass media, “tradition” of love suicide in Japan, prostitution, capitalism in Japan, melodrama as a mode of imagination, Orientalism and Hollywood, racism against Korean Japanese (zainichi), Meiji legal code against adultery, war and imperialism, and postmodern cynicism, etc.
TTh 1:30-2:50; screening M 6:00-9:00 p.m.
EALC 22623/23623 An Introduction to Korean Poetry
J. Hwang
This course involves close readings of selected Korean poems (translated into English), dating from the period from the eighth to the twentieth century and emerging from Korean forms of shamanist, Buddhist, Confucian and modernist cultures, with the goal of offering an overview of the Korean poetic tradition, as well as examining some of the rhetorical conventions that are central to modern Korean culture. Comparative reading of Korean and Chinese or Japanese poems will be pursued. Knowledge of Korean is not required.
TTh 3:00-4:20
EALC 24101/34101 Zen and History
J. Ketellar
This course examines Chan/Zen history, debates over this history, and consequences of Chan/Zen for understanding history and historiography per se.
EALC 24950 The Inner Self in Modern Japanese Literature
M. Bourdaghs
As Japanese leaders in the mid 19th century faced the threat of colonization at the hands of the Western powers, they launched a project to achieve “Civilization and Enlightenment,” quickly transforming Japan into a global power that possessed its own empire. In the process fiction became a site for both political engagement and retreat. A civilized country, it was argued, was supposed to boast “literature” as one of its Fine Arts. This literature was charged with representing the inner life of its characters, doing so in a modern national language that was supposed to be a transparent medium of communication. Between the 1880s and the early 1900s, a new language, new literary techniques, and a new set of ideologies were constructed to produce the “inner life” in novels and short stories. As soon as these new practices were developed, however, they became the objects of parody and ironic deconstruction. Reading key literary texts from the 1880s through the 1930s, as well as recent scholarship, this course will re-trace this historical and literary unfolding, paying special attention to the relationship between language and subjectivity. All readings will be in English.
TTh 3:00-4:20
EALC 26400/46400 Creation and Re-Creation of Yuan Drama
Y. He
This course will explore the Yuan zaju, or “variety play,” both as a cluster of diverse performing arts of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and as a legendary golden age of the Chinese theater created retrospectively by Ming drama aficionados and later by modern scholars. Taking the Yuankan zaju sanshi zhong 元刊雜劇三十種, a rare window into the print world of Yuan performance texts, as the core thread of our inquiry, we will examine the linguistic, literary, musical, and other features of Yuan drama, and explore its rich after-life in the Ming, examining the complex relationships between Ming zaju and their Yuan predecessors. Attention will also be paid to archeological and archival discoveries relating to ancient stages, such as paintings and sculptures. Minimum of one year Chinese required.
W 1:30-4:20
EALC 26500/36500 The Shi Jing: The Classic of Poetry.
E. Shaughnessy
In this course, we will read in and about the Shi jing, or Classic of Poetry, China’s earliest poetry anthology. All readings will be in English, though there will be a separate section for those who wish to read the poems in the original.
TTh 3:00 to 4:20
Graduate Only
EALC 40300 Theories of the Body and Modern Japanese Literature
M. Bourdaghs
This seminar will explore the reconstruction of the human body that has occurred since the nineteenth century with the rise of new technologies and discourses, particularly in the context of modern Japanese literature. We will focus on the rise of new ideologies of disease, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as on both classic and recent scholarship that theorizes the status of the body in relation to culture and history. Because the construction of the modern body cannot be separated from other ideological fields, we will pay special attention to the relation between corporeality, nationalism, and imperialism. Course readings will include both literary and theoretical texts; all readings will be available in English, but some texts will also be provided in Japanese.
W 1:30-4:20
EALC 40500 Modern Chinese History/Doc Sources-1
G.Alitto
Reading knowledge of Chinese, grad students only with consent of instructor.
W 3:00-5:00
EALC 52300 Modern Japanese History-1
J. Ketelaar
(This is a two-quarter course: those who sign up for autumn must also sign up for EALC 52301 in winter quarter) Reading and research in Japanese history, which culminates in a major seminar paper at the end of winter term.
Th 12:00-2:50
Winter 2010
Specific class times will be provided later.
Undergraduate only
EALC 10900 Introduction to Esat Asian Civilizations-2, Japan
S. Burns
EALC 16400 Art of Asia: China
H. Wu
This course introduces the arts of China. We focus on the bronze vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, the Chinese appropriation of the Buddha image, and the evolution of landscape and figure painting traditions. We also consider objects in contexts (from the archaeological sites from which they were unearthed to the material culture that surrounded them) to reconstruct the functions and the meanings of objects, as well as to better understand Chinese culture through the objects it produced.
MW 1:30-2:50
EALC 24303 Shinto
J. Ketelaar
A History of Shinto from Ancient times to the present, examining key texts in translation along with cultural, philosophical, religious and political dimensions relevant to different historical periods.
M 12.30-3.20
EALC 27105 Concentrator Seminar
E. Shaughnessy
The theme of this year’s Seminar will be ways of translating into, between, from, and perhaps within the various East Asian languages, perhaps beginning with Chinese translations of Buddhist texts, ending with translations of Harry Potter, and in between considering other forms of translation (including in non-linguistic media). We will also consider strategies of translating into English. The Seminar will feature presentations by numerous faculty members from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and is required for EALC majors and double majors.
TTh 3:00-4:20
EALC 27410 Historicizing Desire
T. Chin
This course will examine conceptions of desire in ancient China and ancient Greece through an array of early philosophical, literary, historical, legal and medical texts (e.g. Mencius, Sima Qian, Book of Songs, Plato, Sappho). We will attempt not only to bring out the cultural specificities of ancient erotic experience, but also to make visible the historical and geopolitical contingencies of our own methods of reading. To do so, we will explore the broader cultural background of the two ancient periods, and engage with theoretical debates on the history of sexuality, feminist and queer studies, and inter-cultural comparative studies.
TT 3-4:20
Undergraduate/Graduate
EALC 20201/30201 Japan and the World in Nineteenth-Century Art
C. Foxwell
Prerequisite: Arts of Japan or instructor permission. This seminar will explore artistic interaction between Japan and the West in the late 19th century. Topics include: changing European and American views of Japan and its art, the use of Japanese pictorial “sources” by artists such as Manet and Van Gogh, Japan's invocation by decorative arts reformers, Japanese submissions to the world’s fairs, and new forms of Japanese art made for audiences within Japan. Class sessions and a research project are designed to offer different geographical and theoretical perspectives and to provide evidence of how Japonisme appeared from late 19th-century Japanese points of view.
WF 1:30-2:50
EALC 22026/42026 Oe Kenzaburo
J. Yoshida
In this joint seminar, the class will read various pieces of work (short stories, novels, essays, lectures, and reportage) written by a Nobel prize-winning writer, Oe Kenzaburo (1935 – the present). A tentative list of assigned texts includes: “Prize Stock,” Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, “Aghwee the Sky Monster,” A Personal Matter, “Seventeen,” Hiroshima Notes, The Silent Cry, Somersault, The Flood Invades My Spirit, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. All readings are in English. We will also read secondary articles written on Oe’s texts as well as additional texts related to our discussion of his aesthetic and political concerns. For those who prefer to read Oe’s works in Japanese or compare English and Japanese versions, special arrangement will be made upon request. Assignments are close readings of assigned texts, 1-page weekly reaction papers, active participation in discussion, a few brief presentations, and the final paper of 10-15 pages.
TTh 1:30-2:50
EALC 22624/32624 Imagining a Nation: Korean Literature, Painting and Cinema
J. Hwang
This course examines canonical works of modern Korean literature, painting, and cinema in the context of Korea’s negotiation with Japanese colonialism and nation-state building. Among the issues to be discussed are: Korea’s encounter with western literature and art, the experience of colonial modernity, aesthetic conceptions of Korean identity, the rediscovery of Korean landscape, the invention of a national tradition, and the rise of “national learning.
MW 3:00-4:20, Screening T 6:00-8:00 p.m.
EALC 24305/34305 Autobiographical Writings, Gender, and Modern Korea
Kyeong-Hee Choi
This course examines the intersections between gender, the genre of autobiography, and the historical, cultural, and political contexts of modern Korea. Through an introduction to theoretical writings on autobiography and gender as well as selected Korean autobiographical writings, we will address the question of whether and to what extent these autobiographical writings lend a view of Korea’s national history. No knowledge of Korean is required.
T 3:00-6:00
EALC 24704/34704 Nativism and Nationalism in Japan
S Burns
This course will examine the various forms of discourse which have addressed issues of Japanese identity. Topics to be examined include Nativism and Mito Learning, Japanese ethnography (minzokugaku), the Japanese romantic school, and Nihonjinron. Requirements: in class presentations, series of book reviews, research paper. The course can be taken by students without knowledge of Japanese, but graduate students working on Japan will be asked to read in Japanese.
M 12:30-3:20
EALC 24908/34908 Japanese New Wave Cinema, 1955-1973
M. Raine
This course surveys the rise and fall of alternatives to studio cinema in Japan between the 1950s and the 1970s. The concept of a "new wave" is notoriously imprecise: rather than shared stylistic attributes or political programs, the films are best understood as linked in a loose "culture of authenticity" that opposed the jokey emulation of foreign forms in the studio cinema's "culture of the copy." Topics include the Nikkatsu and Shochiku new waves, union-based oppositional cinema, experimental film-making, radical documentary, Cahier's style auteurs, the Shochiku new wave, experimental theatre, the Shinjuku and Shibuya film-theatre subcultures, and the institutional roles of the Sogetsu Art Center and the Art Theatre Guild. No knowledge of Japanese is required: separate section for discussion of Japanese sources.
TTh 12:00-1:20, Screening W 7:00-10:00
EALC 29400/39400 The Ghost Tradition in Chinese Literature, Opera, and Film
J. Zeitlin
What is a ghost? How and why are ghosts represented in particular forms in a particular culture at particular moments? This course will explore the complex meanings, both literal and figurative, of the ghost in Chinese culture across history, focusing on the ghost story, opera, and film. Issues to be explored include: 1) the individual's confrontation with mortality; 2) the relationship between death, gender, and sexuality; 3) anxieties of the loss of the cultural past, and 4) the politics of ghosts in modern times. Course readings will be in English translation, and no prior background is required, but students with reading knowledge of Chinese will be encouraged to do some work with texts in the original.
MW 1:30-2:50, Screening M 5:00-7:00
EALC 33001/43000 Censorship in East Asia: The Case of Colonial Korea
Kyeong-Hee Choi
In colonial Korea, publications by Koreans were invariably subject to prepublication censorship procedures under the system in which the ethno-national lines of laws and rules concerning publications were differentially applied to Koreans and non-Koreans. Exploring the relationship between censorship practices and textual and rhetorical strategies adopted by writers in the Japanese Empire, this course traces the operation of censorship and its consequences upon various activities, through a reading of texts that were produced in and outside of Korea as well as by Koreans in the Empire. There are no prerequisites for this course, but knowledge of Korean or Japanese is preferred.
TTh 1:30-2:50
Graduate only
EALC 40301 Early Postwar Literary Discourse in Japan
M. Bourdaghs
This seminar will focus on Japanese literary and intellectual discourse during the American Occupation period (1945-1952). We will explore the "Politics and Literature" debate, the various attempts to define subjectivity, examples of early postwar fiction and poetry, and recent scholarship on the period. The writers we will likely read include Hirano Ken, Miyamoto Yuriko, Nakano Shigeharu, Noma Hiroshi, and Maruyama Masao. A significant amount of the assigned reading will be in Japanese, although some English-language texts will also be used.
W 1:30-4:20
EALC 41450 Peach Blossom Fan and Palace of Lasting Life
J. Zeitlin
This seminar explores the interplay of history, fantasy, and theatricality in the two great masterpieces of early Qing drama.
Th 1:30-4:20
EALC 42610 Imperial Collections of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy
P. Foong
This course looks at imperial art collections of painting and calligraphy and the institutions that administered them. We will survey approaches in secondary scholarship studying collections amassed for the court by members of the court: emperors, empresses, clansmen, eunuchs, scholars. Readings will focus on the great collections of Emperors Tang Taizong, Li Houzhu, Song Huizong, and Yuan Wenzong (Tugh Temür), but research topics can be chosen from later dynastic periods. Weekly reports, discussion, and final projects may investigate extant works by addressing issues such as: art catalogs as courtly enterprise; the relationship between art and library collections; emperor as private collector/public patron; expatriated collections and imperial identity under foreign rulers, and so on. Chinese and Japanese language required.
Th 1:30-4:20
EALC 45800 Readings in Chinese Buddhist Texts
P.Copp
Guided readings in Chinese Buddhist texts of various genres and periods. This quarter we will read selections from the Lengyan Jing, the so-called "Psuedo-Śūramgama Sūtra."
MW 3:00-4:20
EALC 52301 Modern Japanese History-2
J. Ketelaar
Please see listing for EALC 52300 Autumn 09
Spring 2010
Specific class times will be provided later.
Undergraduate only
EALC 11000 Introduction to Civilization of East Asia: Korea
Kyeong-Hee Choi
The course deals with the Korean historical experience as well as its literary and cultural representations since the early years of Korea to the present. Readings consist of historical narratives, primary materials, literary writings, and secondary texts. While covering an extensive period of history, the course focuses upon selected key historical moments, culturally significant texts and their contexts, as well as figures and themes that address the complexity of the Korean people's experience.
EALC 17110 Sinotopos: Chinese Landscape Representation and Interpretation
P. Foong
This course surveys major areas of study in the Chinese landscape painting tradition, focusing on the history of its pictorial representation during pre-modern eras. Format will be primarily class discussion following a series of lectures. Areas for consideration may include: first emergence and subsequent developments of the genre in court and literati arenas; landscape aesthetics and theoretical foundations; major attributed works in relation to archaeological evidence. Emphasis is on artistic options and the exercise of choice within the context of social, political, religious, and economic forces. Students are expected to gain skills in formal analysis through looking with reading, and a critical perspective on the processes of art historical placement and interpretation based on assigned readings in secondary literature.
TTh 10:30-11:50
EALC 17210 Art and Its Audiences in Early Modern Japan
C. Foxwell
This course examines the diversity of Japanese art in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, relating it to audience diversity during the same period. The shogunal government and imperial court,
samurai and merchants, regional lords and wealthy farmers, geisha and learned women, and urban dandies and lovers of Chinese culture all were patrons of paintings, ceramics, and other arts. We consider changes in the display of objects, concluding with the emergence of the modern Japanese artist and the museum.
MW 3:00-4:20
EALC 19020 The Crowd in Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture
T. Xiao
The crowd in its multiple manifestations, ranging from the ignorant mob blamed for China’s backwardness to the insurgent masses celebrated as the most progressive agent of historical change, proves to be a crucial yet elusive figure in modern Chinese culture. This course will explore the construction, interpretation and comprehension of the “crowd” in the variety of figurations across media that helped fashion the transformation of China from a failing empire described as “a sheet of loose sand” to a nation portrayed as a cohesive body. Issues that will be addressed include the relationship between the crowd and the nation, different strategies developed to conceptualize and represent the crowd, and different uses of the crowd for different political agendas. A primary goal of this course is to examine how Chinese intellectuals, including writers, political thinkers, artists, filmmakers, etc, have tried to give the crowd different names, essences, shapes, as well as realities in twentieth-century China within a global context. The transnational flow of knowledge on and representational prototypes of crowd behavior will be foregrounded in the discussion of Chinese narrative and visual experiments of crowd formation and action. All readings are in English.
EALC 24503 Cinema and Politics in China
S. Xiang
In this course we will consider the intimate if often reluctant involvement of cinema with politics in three periods of modern Chinese history. We will start with the attempts by the Communist Party and Nationalist state alike to use the nascent Chinese cinema for ideological indoctrination in the 1930s, continue with the increasingly total ideological and aesthetic control of cinema during the Socialist era from 1949 onward and end with the critique of that totalitarianism and explorations of previously-proscribed techniques and subjectivities in the post-Socialist cinema of the 1980s. The "big question" we will explore is the interweaving of politics and aesthetics. A distinctive feature of Chinese cinema is that it has seen heavy intervention by political and intellectual elites. Some wanted to use cinema for mass education or indoctrination. Others were against such uses--but for what reasons? We will also read some of the latest scholarship on Chinese cinema that departs from this top-down paradigm and attempts a less elitest look at Chinese cinema and mass media. Key terms include "social realism," "socialist realism," "melodrama" and "vernacular modernism."
TT 3:00-4:20, Screening M 7:00-9:00
EALC 26300 Medicine in Traditional China
D. Harper
This course is a survey of medical ideas and practices in pre-modern China. Topics include “classical” medical theory, religious and magical medicine, sexology, and longevity practices.
EALC 27605 Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Beyond
N. Field
In this course, we will consider the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through literature, film, photo essays and nonfiction writing. We will grapple with the shifting understanding of the bomb and continued nuclear testing both within and without Japan during the Cold War and to the present. We will also study what many consider the current and ongoing form of nuclear war in the widespread deployment of depleted uranium in war zones and military bases, and its contested impact on civilians, soldiers, spouses, and children. In this examination, we will compare nuclear bombing with other forms of bombing, on the one hand, and with its putative peaceful use as a source of energy. No knowledge of Japanese language is necessary. Graduate students wishing to take the course should consult with the instructor.
Undergraduate/Graduate
EALC 20101/30101 The Art of Ancestral Worship
H. Wu
This course focuses on various art forms (e.g. ritual jades and bronzes, tomb murals and sculptures, family temples and shrines) that were created between the third millennium B.C. and the second century A.D. for ancestral worship, the main religious tradition in China before the introduction of Buddhism, Central questions include how visual forms convey religious concepts and serve religious communications, and how artistic changes reflect trends in the ancestral cult.
TTh 3:00-4:20
EALC 22001/32001 Translating Modern Japanese Poetry
N. Field
In this course, to be run in workshop format, we will be reading and translating into English a range of Japanese poetry written from the late nineteenth-century to the present. Although we will read some translation theory as well as acquaint ourselves with standard accounts of the history of modern Japanese poetry, the emphasis will be on generating the questions ourselves through the primary activity of wrestling with the transformation of a set of words living in one language into another. We will work collectively and separately. Students will propose poems for collective translation and for individual projects. Prerequisite: Reading knowledge of modern Japanese.
EALC 22601/32601 Korean Narrative Tradition
J. Hwang
This course examines major texts of Korean narrative in order to understand the ways in which Koreans have made sense of their experience and formed their cultural identities. In this course, we will read excerpts from two of the oldest Korean historical writings, as well as classical stories of different genres such as court narrative, P’ansori verbal art, biography in hanmun (classical Chinese), and works by early twentieth-century novelists and historians. Knowledge of Korean is not required.
MW 3:00-4:20
EALC 22630/32630 The Democratization of South Korea in Literature and Visual Drama
Kyeong-Hee Choi
The struggle for democratization has been integral to the development of literature and the dramatic art of South Korea, particularly since the early 1960s. This course introduces a group of cinematic and televisual dramatic texts, as well as literary works, in order to explore the ways in which literary and visual languages at once build themselves upon official and unofficial discourses of historical events and re-envision the individual and collective struggles as in negotiation with traditions of representation within the history of each genre or medium. No knowledge of Korean is required.
TTh 12:30-1:20, Screening T 5:00-7:00 p.m.
EALC 24905/34905 Agitation and Propaganda: Cinema in Wartime Japan.
M. Raine
This class traces the deployment of cinema as both national culture and “optical weapon” during a time of total war. We will study the Film Law of 1939 and the "national policy films" and "people's films" that attempted to raise the aesthetic and technical level of cinema in Japan in order to compete with the memory of Hollywood films both at "home" and in the Asian countries occupied by Japan. The class will include films made under Japanese sponsorship in the colonies of Taiwan and Korea as well as in the puppet state of Manchuria and the occupied territory of Shanghai. We will also study local sources of wartime Japanese cinema -- the prewar leftist film movement, the documentary film movement, the narrative avant-garde -- in the context of the broader image culture of wartime Japan. No knowledge of Japanese is required: separate section for discussion of Japanese and other Asian sources.
EALC 26201/362021 "Medicine and Culture in Modern East Asian"
S. Burns
This course will focus on the cultural history of medicine in China, Japan, and Korea from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980s. We will be concerned with tracing the circulation of new medical knowledge and understanding its cultural and social implications. Topics to be explored include the introduction of "Western medicine" and its impact for "traditional" medicine, the struggles over public health, gender, medicine, and modernity, consumer culture and medicine. No knowledge of an East Asian language is required, but those with reading skills will be encouraged to utilize them.
W 12.30-3.20
EALC 27901/37901 Asian Wars of the Twentieth Century
B. Cummings
This course examines the political, economic, social, cultural, racial, and military aspects of the major Asian wars of the twentieth century (e.g., Pacific, Korean, Vietnam). The first part of the course, pays
particular attention to just war doctrines. We then use two to three books for each war (along with several films) to examine alternative approaches to understanding the origins of these wars, their conduct, and their consequences.
Graduate only
EALC 37460 Historiography, Literature, Archaeology
T. Chin
This course examines the relation between historicity and the literary, using Sima Qian’s Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) as our primary example. The Shiji is arguably the most influential Chinese work of historiography, and we will also explore its interdisciplinary and international afterlife. Particular attention will be paid to notions of the immaterial (the fictional, the spiritual, the theoretical), the exotic (the non-Chinese, the strange), and the universal, in traditional Chinese historiography and poetics, in modern archaeology, and in critical theory. Students without classical Chinese reading knowledge are welcome to join and to write their final papers on comparative topics.
EALC 42110 Art and Religion: Buddhist and Christian
J. Elsner and H. Wu
MW 1:30-4:20
EALC 42221 Chinese Divination and Games
D. Harper
This seminar examines the relationship between divination and games in ancient and medieval China through texts and archaeological evidence. Minimum of one year literary Chinese required.
EALC 44201 Historical Knowledge and Popular Culture in Japan
S. Burns
This course seeks to critically examine the multiple sites where historical knowledge is created within postwar Japanese society. Topics to be explored include documentary and popular films, travel literature, museums, historical fiction, comic books, and games. Japanese language knowledge is required. Open to undergraduates with consent of the instructor.
EALC 45801 Religion in Medieval Dunhuang
P.Copp
An introduction to the study of the religious cultures evidenced at Dunhuang, both in the manuscripts and xylographs discovered there in the early twentieth century and to a lesser extent in the murals preserved there today. The course will combine readings of the most important scholarship on the site (most of which will be in Chinese), an introduction to the use of Dunhuang materials, as well as examinations of some representative texts and images. Reading ability in modern and literary Chinese is required.
