Undergraduate

EALC 10600 Topics in EALC: Ghosts and the Fantastic in Literature & Film

(CMST 24603, SIGN 26006)

What is a ghost? How and why are ghosts represented in particular forms in a particular culture at particular historical moments and how do these change as stories travel between cultures? How and why is traditional ghost lore reconfigured in the contemporary world? This course will explore the complex meanings, both literal and figurative, of ghosts and the fantastic in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tales, plays, and films. Issues to be explored include: 1) the relationship between the supernatural, gender, and sexuality; 2) the confrontation of death and mortality; 3) collective anxieties over the loss of the historical past; 4) and the visualization of the invisible through art, theater, and cinema.

2020-2021 Spring

EALC 28010/48010 Archaeology of Anyang: Bronzes, Inscriptions, World Heritage

(ANTH 26765, ANTH 36765)

Anyang is one of the most important archaeological sites in China. The discoveries of inscribed oracle bones, the royal cemetery, clusters of palatial structures, and industrial-scale craft production precincts have all established that the site was indeed the last capital of the Shang dynasty recorded in traditional historiography. With almost continuous excavations since the late 1920s, work at Anyang has in many ways shaped and defined Chinese archaeology and the study of Early Bronze Age China. This course intends to examine the history of research, important archaeological finds, and the role of Anyang studies in the field of Chinese archaeology. While the emphasis is on archaeological finds and the related research, this course will also attempt to define Anyang in the modern social and cultural contexts in terms of world heritage, national and local identity, and the looting and illegal trade of antiquities.

Prerequisites

Note(s): Open to undergraduates with consent of instructor.

2020-2021 Winter

EALC 29600 Senior Thesis Tutorial II

Staff
2020-2021 Winter

EALC 28202/38202 New Directions in the Study of Japanese Religion

(HREL 38202, RLST 28202)

The course examines the multiple religious traditions spread across the Japanese archipelago, their tenets, rituals, values, and their intimate ties to literature, politics, social structures and economy. The goal will be to arrive at a substantive understanding of Japanese religions and the state of the field of religious studies, and explore potential directions for future research. We will consider both the openness of Japanese religion to incorporate new ideas and its proclivity for relational and amalgamative theories and practices, and also cases of outright rejection of certain Sinitic and pan-Asian ideas. Accordingly, this course will focus not only on the religions of Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism, but also their interactions with other traditions such as Onmyōdō, Shugendō, and popular religion (minkan shūkyō).

Each week we will read a recent monograph and analyze the main arguments and its methodological contribution to the field of religious studies and Japanese religion. Students will be asked to reflect critically on the central arguments of the books, as well as their discussion of doctrine, practice and cultural trends examined in the readings. The topics that we will discuss each week are diverse and include: Esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō), original enlightenment thought (hongaku), religious readings of literature (narrative and poetry), visual culture in Pure Land Buddhism, Kuroda Toshio’s Marxist and political theory, State Shinto and nationalism, cross-cultural transmissions between Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen, mountain worship and maritime religiosity, and Japan’s imagination of South Asia. We will pay close attention to how scholars use various methodologies and theories in their examinations of religious phenomena, such as ritual theory, literary and critical theory, feminist and queer theory, among others. Over the course of the quarter, students will build their own methodological and theoretical toolkits and put them into practice by writing a research paper.

2020-2021 Winter

EALC 25811/35811 Foundations of Chinese Buddhism

(RLST 22501)

An introduction to Buddhism in China, examined through lenses of texts, thought, and art. We will explore the major currents of Chinese Buddhist practice with a focus on the premodern tradition through around the 13th century (with some attention to modern connections), giving special consideration to major textual and artistic monuments, such as translated scriptures, Chan literature, and the cave-shrines of Dunhuang.   

2020-2021 Winter

EALC 25301 Inventing the Chinese Short Story

This class will trace the emergence of the vernacular short story as a new genre in the late Ming and early Qing. We will focus on the seveteenth-century story collections of Feng Menglong, Ling Mengchu, Aina Jushi, and Li Yu, whose stories map the social whole of late imperial China—from merchant schemes to courtesan romances, from the friendships of students to the follies of emperors. Alongside close readings of selected stories, we will examine the structure, sources, and publication histories of these collections and locate them in a broader discussion of the meanings and functions of vernacular literature. All readings in English.

2020-2021 Winter

EALC 24916 Yōkai Media

(CMST 24916)

This course centers on yōkai (monsters or fantastic creatures) and theories of the fantastic in cinema and media. Historically, it spans the range from medieval emaki and Edo chōnin culture through 20th and 21st century manga and anime. Inquiry into yōkai and the fantastic is intended to develop new strategies for putting cinema and media into dialogue with theories of political sovereignty and capitalism in the context of everyday life and its urban myths.

T. Lamarre
2020-2021 Autumn

EALC 24713/34713 Society and the Supernatural in Late Imperial and Modern China

(HIST 24712, HIST 34712, HREL 34712, RLST 24712)

Introductory studies of Chinese history and culture often ignore religion, treating Confucius’s alleged agnosticism as representative of mainstream culture. But ideas about supernatural entities—souls separated from bodies, ancestral spirits, demons, immortals, the vital energies of mountains and rivers, and many more—and practices aimed at managing those spirits were important elements in  pre-1949 life. Spirits testified in court cases, cured or caused illnesses, mediated disputes, changed the weather, and made the realm governable or ungovernable. After declining in the 1950s–1970s, various kinds of worship are immensely popular again today, though usually in altered forms. This course traces changes in the intersection of ideas about spirits and daily social practices from late imperial times forward, focusing on attempts to “standardize the gods,” resistance to such efforts, and the consequences for cohesion, or lack of cohesion, across classes, territory, ethnicity, and other differences.

2020-2021 Winter

EALC 24626/34626 Japanese Cultures of the Cold War: Literature, Film, Music

This course is an experiment in rethinking what has conventionally been studied and taught as "postwar Japanese culture" as instances of global Cold War culture. We will look at celebrated works of Japanese 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. We will also look at English-language writing on Japan from during and after the Cold War period. Previous coursework on modern Japanese history or culture is helpful, but not required. All course readings will be in English.

2024-2025 Winter

EALC 24508 Human Rights in Japanese History K. Pan

(HIST 24508)

This course examines how the modern concept of "rights" and "human rights" localized in Japan and how different parties in Japan have used the language of human rights in attempts to remake Japan's social, cultural, and legal landscape. We will explore a wide range of topics including the translation of Eurocentric rights talk in East Asia, colonization and decolonization, statelessness and migration, transitional justice and reconciliation, biopolitical rights and bio-citizenship, indigenous rights, and women and gender-specific rights. Throughout the course we pay special attention to the ways in which rights talk and human-rights politics in Japan intertwine with the country's efforts to modernize and build the "nation within the empire" and, after its defeat in WWII, to close off its "long postwar" and reconcile with its neighbors. This is an introductory course, and no previous knowledge of Japanese history or the international history of human rights is required. However, you should be prepared to read (and watch, browse, and listen to) a wide array of primary and secondary sources that destabilize the most common vocabulary and concepts we take for granted in contemporary human-rights talk such as race, state responsibility, and the very notion of universalism so central to the idea of human rights.

K. Pan
2020-2021 Winter
Subscribe to Undergraduate