Undergraduate

Peking opera (jingju) is the one nationally prominent form of traditional performing arts in China. This course will introduce concepts and methods that can be applied to the study of Peking opera. Emphasis will be put on understanding artistic elements essential to the living tradition of performance - the visual aspects including stylized stage gesture and movement, sets and costumes, and colors; the music and oral transmission. Topics for discussion include "realism", alienation, time and space, connoisseurship, and film. Students will not only engage with scholarly literature that cuts across different disciplines, but also be introduced to a rich body of sources ranging from gramophone recordings, to photographs, opera films and documentaries. Motivated students will also learn some basics of singing and moves. Field trips to Chinese community Peking opera troupes may be arranged. Mandarin a plus but not a prerequisite.

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.

This course is part of a three-quarter sequence on the civilizations of China, Japan, and Korea or Viet Nam, with emphasis on major transformation in these cultures and societies from the Middle Ages to the present. Taking these courses in sequence is not required. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies.

This seminar (required for all East Asian majors) is intended to expose students to the different disciplines and areas represented in the study of East Asia at the University of Chicago. Students should take this chance to meet fellow majors in the various areas of East Asian Studies and to familiarize themselves with the work of faculty members. Third year students should be already thinking about finding a topic and a faculty advisor for a senior thesis. Conventionally, the Concentrators Seminar is organized around a theme. The goal of this interdisciplinary seminar is to expose students to a range of important problems and methods across time and space in the study of China, Japan and Korea. Guest lecturers and reading assigned by different University of Chicago faculty members are an integral part of the course. Students work on an individual research project tailored to their own interests, which they may subsequently develop into a B.A paper. This course is offered every year; however the quarter may change.

In this course we will explore three distinct but interrelated modes of self-cultivation and the contemplative life from premodern China: those exemplified by the _Laozi_, and in particular by those artists and philosophers who drew upon the text; by the Chan tradition in Tang and Song Buddhism; and by the Song Neo-Confucian philosopher and exegete Zhu Xi (1130-1200). We will read classic texts in these modes (and a few modern ones too) closely, attuning ourselves as best we can to their original contexts, and we will brood together on how we might use them in our own contemplative lives. Central to the course will be careful consideration of the different understandings of the Way (Dao) found in our texts, and how these different Ways structured conceptions of the ideal human life.

This course looks at a crucial 600 years of Chinese history, the period 100-700 AD. I hope we can touch on the high points of dynastic failures and successes, military and border problems, and state economic and military policies, going mostly chronologically. Simultaneously, we shall look at a series of individuals who wrote, thought, and/or advised during these centuries, about these political matters and about private matters. Thus the course analyzes the state and its politics as entwined with written ideas, policy changes, speculations, and even inventions and discoveries. The writer/thinkers whom we look at were China's scholarly elite: they were concerned about personal and factional power: the dynasty's political legitimation and its rewards of wealth and office; also they were concerned about reading, editing, commenting on the classics, writing letters and memoranda, collecting and organizing libraries and artifacts. They invented new genres to express intimate views about self and family and friends, interior thoughts, and even spiritual change and religious beliefs. We will assess and discuss prose, technical achievements, poetry, and letters.

This course is part of a three-quarter sequence on the civilizations of China, Japan, and Korea or Viet Nam, with emphasis on major transformation in these cultures and societies from the Middle Ages to the present. Taking these courses in sequence is not required. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies.

This course explores the Chinese experience of urban modernity in the twentieth century, primarily through the lens of literature, cinema, and ethnographical studies. We will examine the shifting cultural connotations of and dynamics between the country and the city, and trace the ebbs and flows of urban culture from Republican Shanghai, Socialist China, to the colonial city of Hong Kong, the island of Taiwan, and back to fin-de-siècle mainland China. Central to our inquiry is the colonial origin of urban modernity and its evolution and manifestations in twentieth-century China; as an evolving constellation informed by and responding to global forces and cultural trends, as well as to the material conditions on the ground and the individual inspirations of cultural producers. The course will be divided roughly into three parts. First, we will delve into the urban milieu and material culture of Republic Shanghai under semi-colonial capitalism, and inquire the formation of vernacular modernity through its cinematic and literary representations and practices. Second, we will compare the youth cultures in socialist China and colonial Hong Kong during the cold war era. We will then continue to review the search for urban/local identities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, amid a culture of disappearance exacerbated by their colonial histories, the unresolved question of national belonging, and accelerating globalization. Third, we will return to mainland China to consider its breakneck speed of urbanization and globalization in the contemporary era. We will explore the euphoria and discontent, confusion and chaos, as Chinese people in their different social standings and geographical positions experience the brave new world of global modernity in drastically uneven terms. From New Sensationalism to postsocialist realism, melodrama to independent documentary, the figures of dandy and flaneur to migrant worker and alienated youth, this course also investigates the use of literary form and cinematic genre, and the configurations of gender and class identities, in conveying the urban experience in twentieth-century China.

This course is an experiment in rethinking what has conventionally been studied and taught as "postwar Japanese culture" as instances of Cold War culture. We will look at celebrated works of fiction, film and popular music from 1945 through 1990, but instead of considering them primarily in relation to the past events of World War Two, we will try to understand them in relation to the unfolding contemporary global situation of the Cold War. Previous coursework on modern Japanese history or culture is helpful, but not required. All course readings will be in English.

Beginning in the 1910s, Chinese intellectuals discovered a new source of cultural identity for China in the songs, myths, legends and life-ways of the countryside. Over the course of the century, various modes of representing this folk culture were enlisted to help define the nation, from the appropriation of folkloric genres for the creation of modern literary works to the critical study of Chinese history and society through the lens of folk culture, including the politicization of folklore as it was adapted for the dissemination of revolutionary ideology during wartime and afterward. Through the study of folklore itself, modern fiction and poetry, historical sources on the study of folklore, and music and film recordings, this course critically examines how folklore and notions of cultural authenticity have contributed to the construction of the modern Chinese nation.