Courses
Spring 2008
EALC 27605 Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Beyond
N. Field
In this course we examine the historical and cultural record of the droppings of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 194. We consider the nuclear age as it has extended to the present day, and hibakusha (radiation victims) in their manifestations around the world throughout this age, particularly with respect to nuclear reactor accidents and the implications of the deployment of depleted uranium. Two crucial features of the course are the "interlocuter" project, in which course material is examined and extended with an outside interlocuter, and the collaborative archival project, which makes use of atomic scientists' materials in Regenstein Library's Special Collections holdings. *Graduate students with consent of instructor only.
EALC 28100/38100 The Writer and the People in Modern Chinese Literature
P. Iovene
How to relate to the “people”—as readers, subjects of representation, and as potential authors—is a lasting concern of literary theory and practice in Twentieth Century China. In this course, we will explore how different Chinese writers, critics, and theorists have embraced or disavowed the category of the people, paying particular attention to their stylistic choices and the ways in which these reinforce or contradict their theoretical statements. Questions we will address include the relationship between the people and the nation, the search for popular forms and a popular language, the tensions between political and cultural self-positioning and between the political field and the literary market, and the roles of gender.
All readings are in English translation. Graduate students are expected to read some Chinese materials.
EALC 29700 Senior Thesis Research
Approval by undergraduate director required. This course is intended for students who are undertaking a BA paper directed by EALC faculty.
EALC 42500 Reading North Korean Literature in the United States
K. Choi
EALC 43805 Modernist and Proletarian Literature
N. Field
The course title reflects a commonly held antithesis between formally experimental modernist literature and simplemindedly realist proletarian literature. This antithesis, in fact, that will be challenged in the course, which will explore the hypotheis that proletarian and anti-proletarian literature were both vital, interdependent expressions of modernism in Japan. Reading knowledge of modern Japanese is preferred; those without it, whether graduate or undergraduate, should seek the consent of the instructor.
EALC 44510 Chinese Avant-Garde Literature in Context
P. Iovene
This course will explore contemporary Chinese avant-garde literature in the context of the institutional and market forces that contributed to its transformations from the 1980s to the present. We will debate different notions of “avant-garde,” their genealogy, and their relation to concepts of transnational and world literatures, discuss the role of literary editors, critics, translators, and publishers, and examine major literary debates in the Chinese literary field ranging from those on “modernism” in the early 1980s to those on “pure literature” in the early 2000s. Writers to be discussed may include Ge Fei, Sun Ganlu, Yu Hua, Bi Feiyu, Chen Cun, and Chen Ran. Materials are in Chinese and English.
EALC 47100 Everyday Life in Socialist China
J. Eyferth
This graduate course will examine the vast and elusive realm of “the everyday” in post-1949 China, with special attention being paid to the 1950s and 1960s – a time in which many aspects of everyday life were rapidly transformed. In the first few weeks, we will review different approaches to the everyday, ranging from early twentieth-century theories (Simmel, Benjamin, Elias) to recent feminists critiques of everyday life, studies of everyday technology, practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte and microstoria, etc. In the second part of the course, we will look at different aspects of the everyday in the early PRC, including work routines, leisure and play, domestic life and consumption, and everyday strategies of coping with political and economic change. Rather than trying to conceptualize “modernity” through everyday life, as much recent work has done, we will focus on the concrete, the experiential, and the mundane. Readings will be in English and Chinese.
EALC 60000 Rdg Course: Spec Topic Ealc
Intended for students in EALC graduate program to enroll in additional reading/research course with EALC faculty. Approval of EALC faculty member required.
EALC 65000 Directed Translation
Fulfils translation requirement for EALC graduate students. Must be arranged with individual faculty member. Register by section with EALC faculty.
Winter 2008
EALC 10900 Intro to East Asian Civ - 2
J. Ketelaar
This sequence on the civilizations of China, Japan, and Korea emphasizes major transformation in these cultures and societies from their inception to the present. Winter quarter focuses on Japan.
M, W, F 10:30-11:20
(Questions regarding this course should be directed to the instructor or the History department)
EALC 12000 Fiction of Marketplace: Fiction and Print Culture in Late Imperial China
Suyoung Son
This course aims to understand the historical importance of print culture and its impact on the production and reception of pre-modern Chinese fiction. Contrary to the modern conception of fiction, most of pre-modern Chinese fiction was not the creations of a solitary individual, but the collective and cumulative products created through a process of a series of editings and printings. We will in particular focus on the ways in which the flourishing commercial book market intervened and mediated in the making of printed fiction in late imperial China: how did fiction change before and after re/print? Did the preface and commentary attached by publishers reshape the meaning of the text? How did the understanding of print culture challenge the modern notion of self-sufficient nature of the text and its author as the sole creator of the meaning of the text? We will closely examine one of the most scandalous and licentious fictions, The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei) and a popular martial-arts fiction, The Water Margin (Shuihu
zhuan) in relation with commercial book market in late imperial China.
T,Th 1:30-2:50
EALC 14407 The Proletariat in Modern Japanese Literature
George Sipos
With Japan’s industrialization at the end of the 19th century, a new social class emerged: the proletariat. Led by poverty, men and women left their homes and families in the country and used their only asset—their labor—to provide for those left behind. This course will follow the evolution of the proletariat as a character in modern Japanese literature using sources available in English. Combined with major theoretical writings about Marxism and its understanding of the role of literature in class struggle, we will attempt to establish a genealogy of the proletariat in Japan through its representations in literature. From the early buds of Socialist-Christian thought to the peak of the communist movement in the early 1930s and from the tenkō (“change of direction”) texts to the postwar prison memoirs, we will cover a period of roughly 70 years of representations of the proletariat in works of fiction and non-fiction.
M, W 4:30-5:50
EALC 17000 Love and Domesticity in Korea
Yoon Sun Yang
On the premise that ‘love’ is differently understood, experienced, and pronounced according to historical contexts rather than universally and timelessly given, this course will explore the ways in which the language of love has changed in the modern era with the emergence of modern domesticity as the pivotal event. This modern transformation of intimacy will be examined from the vantage point of Korea, the last stop of the global circulation of the ideologies of the ‘cult of domesticity’ and of modern romantic love. Readings will include both a wide range of Korean literature from traditional to contemporary and non- Korean literature by American missionaries and Japanese writers that not only witnessed but also participated in the transformation of modern love and domesticity in Korea.
Historical accounts and theoretical texts will be offered as well to investigate social, cultural, and political institutions such as marriage, family, and state-ideology that shaped or transformed the ‘private’ space and ‘private’
feelings. We will also use a variety of visuals as supplementary course materials, for example, photographs, paintings, films, illustrations, and caricatures.
All readings will be in English.
T, Th 12:00-1:20
EALC 26300 Medicine in Traditional China
CANCELLED
EALC 23603 Japanese Cinema and Modernity
J. Yoshida
This course offers an introduction to the history and criticism of Japanese cinema, focusing on its major directors and genres such as melodrama, gendaigeki, comedies, etc. The primary goal of this course is to learn formal aspects of Japanese films and their historical specificities, keeping in mind how aesthetic debates are often over-determined by our historically conditioned understanding of Japan and modernity. Problematizing basic categories of thoughts such as the nation, tradition/modernity, identity/subject, origins/history, we will highlight a series of epistemological tensions that have particularly haunted Japanese film criticisms. Topics to be covered will be the roles of benshi, imperialism, Taisho juneigageki (“pure film”) movement, wartime national policy film, the postwar U.S. Occupation and Cold War geopolitics in Asia, the decline of the studio system, and globalization. On the agenda will be discussions of how mass entertainment has served to dissolve and re-define the boundaries between art and politics at various junctures.
M, W 3:00-4:20
EALC 24607/34607(CMST 24607/34607) Chinese Independent Documentary Film
P. Iovene
This course examines the styles and functions of Chinese documentary film since 1989, with particular attention to the cultural, institutional, economic, and political conditions that underpin its flourishing. We will discuss the ways in which recent Chinese documentaries fit or challenge current theories of the genre, how they redefine the relationship between fiction and non-fiction, and the problems of artistic form and ethics of representation that they pose. Taking into account both the national and international dimensions of Chinese documentary film, we will look at its circulation in Asia and elsewhere, and will debate the political implications and limits of “independent” cinema in the wake of intensified globalization. Readings will include theorizations of the documentary genre in relation to other visual media and narrative forms, analyses of specific works, web-based forums, and overviews of recent institutional changes in Chinese cinema and media.
M,W 1:30-2:50 class, T 7-10 screening
EALC 25001 Change, Conflict and Resistance in Twentieth Century China
J. Eyferth
This course examines social, political, and economic transformations during China’s “revolutionary century.” We will look at the formation of a new working class in China’s Treaty Ports and at the role ideologies of gender and local origin played in this process; at the differences and commonalities between Guomindang, Communist, and Militarist regimes in the Republican era and their impact, particularly on rural China; at the attempt to revolutionize family life and to create a new socialist person under Mao; at the systems of inclusion and exclusion – class labels, work unit membership, household registration – that dominated everyday life in the Maoist period; and finally, at the emergence of a deeply stratified and unequal society in the reform and post-reform eras. All readings are in English.
W, 1:30-4:20
EALC 27105 EALC Concentrators' Seminar: Letters and Texts in Pre-digital East Asia
K. Choi
This seminar examines the ways in which people of East Asia have produced, appreciated, preserved, and controlled letters and texts in a broad sense. Drawing upon the expertise of East Asian Studies faculty, it explores a variety of means of intellectual and textual production through the different socio-historical and politico-economical relationships among materials, humans, and institutions. By linking issues related to letters and texts to notions of the body in particular, students investigate the embodiment of immaterial ideas and thoughts into texts and their institutional integration into an existing body of similar texts. Topics for discussion include the invention of letters, book-making, “high/low” division of culture, and the development of vernacular literary culture, forms of higher education, among others.
Notes: Required of EALC concentrators
Th, 1:30-4:20
EALC 43000 Censorship in East Asia: The Case of Colonial Korea
K. Choi
Thought control and censorship are features of East Asian modernity that had a spectrum of variations across the region and the ethno-national identities of producers of publications, as well as depending upon specific historical periods. For a proper historical understanding of these phenomena, knowledge of censorship within the Japanese Empire is pivotal, for its legal and administrative measures were firmly institutionalized in East Asia at large in the first half of the twentieth century. This course focuses on Japan’s censorship in colonial Korea, with a larger goal of developing a comparative perspective on various regions in the Japanese Empire. The course pursues three main areas of Japanese censorship in Korea: human agents of external and internal censorship; censored texts; and translation as integral to colonial censorship.
PQ: Students should consult with the Instructor before enrollment.
T, 1:30-4:20
EALC 45800 Readings in Chinese Buddhist Texts
P. Copp
Close readings of texts of various genres from the Chinese Buddhist tradition.
PQ: Reading knowledge of Classical Chinese.
M, 1:30-4:20 note day change. Time has been adjusted to Monday to avoid conflict with Don Harper's Classical Chinese course. The time change will appear on the time schedules when they are reopened after Thanksgiving.
EALC 46610 Seminar: Rethinking Meiji Literature: Historicizing Modernity
M. Bourdaghs
This course will survey recent scholarship, in both English and Japanese, on literature of the Meiji period (1868-1912). We will read Kamei Hideo’s Meiji bungakushi (Meiji literary history; 2000), an attempt to historicize Meiji literature beyond the constraints of the convention canon, as well as several recent studies by North American scholars. We will also read several works of Meiji period fiction in the original Japanese. Among the topics we will focus on are gender, imperialism, the rise of modern media, the invention of new writing styles and national language, and discourses of the family and of domestic space. Readings will be in English and Japanese.
W 1:30-4:20.
Autumn 2007
EALC 10800: Intro to East Asia Civilization - 1
M. Buck-Young
This sequence on the civilizations of China, Japan, and Korea emphasizes major transformation in these cultures and societies from their inception to the present.
M, W, F 10:30-11:20
EALC 23208/EALC 33208: Classics of Chinese Religious Literature
P.Copp
This course is intended to introduce students to the great breadth of Chinese religious literature, particularly its Daoist and Buddhist varieties, through close and careful reading of some of its great books. We read four or five major texts in their entirety, as well as selections from other texts, against the background of religious doctrine and cultural history. But our focus is on the texts themselves, rather than trying to understand them as exemplars of a certain religion. Texts in English.
T, Th 1:30-2:50
EALC 24305/34305 (GNDR 25300) Autobiographical Writings, Gender, and Modern Korea
K. Choi
The appreciation of the idea of individual is generally considered to be a characteristic of modernity in Korea. Intriguingly, the emergence of a strong collectivist brand of nationalism also characterizes the same modern era—colonial societies in particular. How did then the idea of individual and the nation intersect, converge, and contradict with each other in the genre of self-writing (autobiographical writings), a distinctively modern genre in the case of colonial Korea? This course explores the relationships between the autobiographical writings, individual, and Korea’s historical and cultural contexts, especially through the prism of gender. It addresses the question of whether, and to what extent the autobiographical writings by men and women similarly, or differently, provide a point from which to understand modern Korea.
Notes: Students should consult with the Instructor before enrollment
T, 1:30-4:20
EALC 24502: Early Chinese Cinema
J. McGrath
EALC 24950: Constructing and Deconstructing 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.
T, Th 3:00-4:20
EALC 25305/35305 Dream of the Red Chamber and the Culture of Late-imperial China
Y. He
While closely reading Cao Xueqin’s Honglou meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber), this course also examines a web of texts, images, and issues across various literary and cultural genres in late-imperial China. A range of texts, images, and issues that form the historical, intellectual, artistic, and social context of the novel will allow us to 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, textual circulation (manuscript and print), as well as dimensions of material culture, and theories of medicine and illness. Screenings from the 80’s Chinese TV soap opera Honglou meng will also be incorporated into class discussions. All readings are in English. Readings in the original Chinese and additional instruction will be offered.
T, Th 1:30-2:50.
Graduate Seminars
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 45500: Early Chinese Excavated Manuscripts
D. Harper
Introduction to the study of archaeologically excavated manuscripts of the Warring States, Qin, and Han periods.
W 1:30-4:20
EALC 45700: Sources and Methods for the Study of Chinese Buddhism
P. Copp
An introduction to the study of Chinese Buddhist texts and to the field of Chinese Buddhist studies, mainly as it has been practiced in North America and Europe.
W 1:30-4:20
EALC 46560: Xixiang ji (The Story of the Western Wing)
Y. He
This course will focus on the best-known play from the Yuan dynasty zaju genre, the Xixiang ji (Story of the Western Wing), a love story that became one of the central reference points for the popular culture of late imperial China. We will examine the play’s reception history, circulation, and critical evaluation from its own era up to the present. Issues to be discussed include: performing genres, dramatic language, operatic music, print history, and visual representations of scenes from the Xixiang ji in Chinese art history.
EALC 52300: Modern Japanese History -I
J. Ketelaar
Reading and research in Japanese history, which culminates in a major seminar paper at the end of winter term.
Tu 3:00-5:50
