Undergraduate

EALC 24455/34455 New Histories of Chinese Labor

(HIST 24306/34306)

Past scholarship has often reduced the history of Chinese labor to the history of the Chinese labor movement or the history of the Communist Party in its function as “the leading core” of the proletariat. The factory proletariat, of course, was never more than a small segment of the Chinese labor force – less than five percent under the Republic, less than ten in the People’s Republic. Recent work has been more inclusive, looking at work outside the formal sector, in agriculture, handcrafts, and service industries; at the work of women in formal employment and at home; at sex work and emotional work; at unemployment and precarious work; at the work of internal migrants; at Chinese workers abroad; at coerced work in private industry (the 2007 “kiln slaves’ incident”); and at carceral labor in Xinjiang and elsewhere. Most of the readings will deal with work in the Mao and post-Mao years, right up to the present. We will combine readings on Chinese labor history with more general texts on the relationship between productive and reproductive work, wage work and non-wage work, male and female work, autonomous and heteronomous work. The guiding question throughout the course is if a new Chinese labor movement is necessary, possible, or probable, and if it is not, under which conditions it might become so.

2023-2024 Spring

JAPN 20700 Fourth-Year Modern Japanese III

Open to both undergraduates and graduates. This course is designed to improve Japanese reading, speaking, writing and listening ability to the advanced high level as measured by the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Proficiency Guidelines. Weekly assignments will require students to tackle modern Japanese texts of varying length and difficulty. Organized around a range of thought-provoking themes (from brain death and organ transplants to Japanese values on work and religion), reading assignments will include academic theses in psychology and anthropology, literary texts, and popular journalism. After completing the readings, students will be encouraged to discuss each topic in class. Videos/DVDs will be used to improve listening comprehension skills. There will also be writing assignments.

Prerequisites

JAPN 20600 or placement, or consent of instructor

Staff
2023-2024 Spring

JAPN 21300 Intermediate Modern Japanese through Japanimation II

This course focuses on learning spoken Japanese that is aimed at native speakers. The goals are getting accustomed to that sort of authentic Japanese and being able to speak with a high degree of fluency. To keep a balance, writing and reading materials are provided. Watching videos and practicing speaking are the keys to success in this course.

Prerequisites

JAPN 21200, or placement, or consent of instructor. 

Staff
2023-2024 Spring

JAPN 20600 Fourth-Year Modern Japanese II

This course is intended to improve Japanese reading, speaking, writing, and listening ability to the advanced low level as measured by the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Proficiency Guidelines. Weekly assignments require students to tackle modern Japanese texts of varying length and difficulty. Organized around a range of thought-provoking themes, reading assignments include academic theses, literary texts, and popular journalism. After each reading, students are encouraged to discuss the topic in class and are required to write their own thoughts on each reading along with a summary. The class meets for two eighty-minute sessions each week.

Prerequisites

JAPN 20500or placement, or consent of instructor. All courses in this sequence must be taken for a quality grade.

Staff
2023-2024 Winter

JAPN 21200 Intermediate Modern Japanese through Japanimation I

This course focuses on learning spoken Japanese through full-length Japanese animated films. To ensure balance in learning, writing and reading materials are also provided. Students at this level are able to handle successfully a variety of uncomplicated communicative tasks in straightforward social situations. The class meets for five fifty-minute sessions each week.

Prerequisites

JAPN 20100, or placement, or consent of instructor. All courses in this sequence must be taken for a quality grade. No auditors permitted.

Staff
2023-2024 Winter

JAPN 20500 Fourth-Year Modern Japanese I

This course is intended to improve Japanese reading, speaking, writing, and listening ability to the advanced low level as measured by the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Proficiency Guidelines. Weekly assignments require students to tackle modern Japanese texts of varying length and difficulty. Organized around a range of thought-provoking themes, reading assignments include academic theses, literary texts, and popular journalism. After each reading, students are encouraged to discuss the topic in class and are required to write their own thoughts on each reading along with a summary. The class meets for two eighty-minute sessions each week.

Prerequisites

JAPN 20403, or JAPN 30300, or placement, or consent of instructor. All courses in this sequence must be taken for a quality grade.

Staff
2023-2024 Autumn

CHIN 20402 Advanced Modern Chinese II

The goal of this sequence is to help students develop advanced proficiency in reading, listening, speaking, and writing. This sequence emphasizes more advanced grammatical structures, and requires discussion in Chinese on topics relevant to modern China. Over the course of this sequence, the emphasis will shift to authentic Chinese texts in an effort to better prepare students to deal with orginal Chinese source materials. Class meets for five one-hour sessions each week.

Prerequisites

CHIN 20401 or placement, or consent of instructor. For both graduates and undergraduates. No auditors. Must be taken for a quality grade.

2023-2024 Winter

EALC 29450/39450 Wonders and Marvels in Premodern Japan

(TAPS 28450/38450)

This course is an exploration of concepts of the wonderous and marvelous in Japanese literature and performance up to 1900. Primary texts and materials will include setsuwa collections, such as the Nihon ryoiki and Konjaku monogatari, poetry and poetics, late Heian monogatari, early modern travel fiction, theater, and encyclopedias.We will also consider theater's engagement with the spacial and embodied aspects of wonder through noh performance and theory, spectacle shows and circuses, exhibitions and worlds fairs, the operating theater and the human body. Alongside these primary texts and performances, we will survey recent scholarship on the history of wonder and marvel, considering along the way theories of fictionality, theatricality, affect and the senses, "objective agency" and the stage prop, and intersections between science, medicine, and the ludic.

Readings will be available in English and no prior coursework in Japanese literature or history is required.

2023-2024 Autumn

EALC 28410/38410 Literary Censorship in Contemporary China

What does "censorship" mean? Specifically, how does the censorship of literature work in contemporary China, and what are its goals? How does censorship relate to the selective remembering of history, to processes of linguistic unification, to questions of morality and politics, and to the respect for minorities and subaltern groups? Guided by these broad questions and combining theoretical readings and case studies, this class aims to develop a nuanced approach to literary censorship that takes into account the constraints and limitations that always attend to the creation and circulation of literary works--in China as elsewhere.

2023-2024 Autumn

EALC 14570 Special Topics: Animation Theory

(CMST 14570, MAAD 14570)

Due to the ubiquity and pervasiveness of animation in contemporary media ecologies, recent years have seen a surge of interest in animation theory. But animation theory presents a vast and turbulent domain of inquiry, because animation may be narrowly defined as a set of objects or techniques or broadly conceptualized to embrace questions about life and death, about more-than-human animals, artificial life, and animism, for instance. This topics course has two aims. The first aim is to provide an overview of the key problematics of and approaches to animation theory in a global and historical perspective. The second aim is to develop tools for doing animation theory in a more localized manner. To this end, course will highlight theories of character and characterization with an emphasis on how the inherent tension between individual and type in animation affects our understanding race and racism.

2022-2023 Winter
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