Undergraduate

What happened to Peking Man? Where did rice cultivation begin and who made the first pottery? Why were hoards of bronzes buried and what were they used for? This course will explore themes such as the origins of humans, the beginning of agriculture, early villages and cities, metal technology, ancient writing systems, and the rise of states and civilizations in East Asia. It will also discuss the current state of archaeological research in Asia, and the role of archaeology in nation building and modern geopolitics. The rich resources available in the museums of Chicago will also be explored.

This course examines the history of Sino-Western relations through the perspective of law. Today when we talk about Chinese law in Western contexts, it is often associated with impressions such as human rights abuse and rule of person instead of law. Ever since the early eighteen century, law has assumed a prominent role in the development of Sino-Western relation. Using law as a primary analytical framework, this course surveys a variety of issues arising from Sino-Western interactions during the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. Questions to be discussed include what role does the West, both as political actors and a source of ideology, play in shaping understanding of Chinese law and politics? How did judicial knowledge of business, sovereignty, and family structure change as China entered the global world of nation-states? How did understanding of law help construct and reconstruct notions of ethnicity, marriage, and gender over time in cross-cultural settings? You will be able to understand broad political processes such as modernization, colonization, and globalization, as well as their impact on everyday life. In addition to discussing how Western observers produced knowledge about Chinese law, we also examine the role of law in the Qing Empire’s expansion. The parallel of the two trajectories – one Chinese and one Western – will lead us to reconsider some of the assumptions in cross-cultural studies.

This course aims at an in-depth examination of the “dark side” of modernism through closing readings of various kinds of outsiders, misfits, and sociopaths in literature and film, with a focus on but not limited to East Asia and the 20th Century. If being “social” amounts above all to an acknowledgement of the plurality of human lives and an acquiescence to live together with others, what then does it mean to reject such a fundamental premise? In this course, we will investigate a variety of fictional characters who cannot or will not conform with the implicit conventions of communal life—criminals, lunatics, or simply people who find themselves struggling to sympathize with the feelings of others, etc. In tackling the aforementioned questions, our inquiry will be guided by a range of distinct methodological approaches such as moral philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Readings may include works by Lu Xun, Ma-Xu Weibang, Yi Sang, Kinugasa Teinosuke, Edogawa Rampo, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kōbō, Murakami Haruki, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett, Gaston Leroux, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Jarman. All readings will be in English.

This course explores the intersections between gender, the genre of autobiography, forms of media (written; oral; visual; audiovisual) and historical, cultural, and political contexts of modern Korea. The students read theoretical writings on autobiography and gender as well as selected Korean autobiographical writings while being introduced to Korean historical contexts especially as they relate to practice of publication in a broader sense. The focus of the course is placed on the female gender—on the relationship between Korean women’s life-experience, self-formation, and writing practices in particular while dealing with the gender relationship in general, although some relevant discussions on the male gender proceeds in parallel.

An occupational hazard of the professions of official and scholar in traditional China was banishment (liufang) to a remote province—a punishment that might be handed down for a variety of behaviors. This course will concentrate on writings by noted poets who endured periods of banishment to the empire’s supposedly uncivilized frontiers: Liu Zongyuan, Han Yu, Su Shi, Ji Xiaolan, Lin Zexu, in particular, reading their exile texts together with the older texts that helped them voice their predicament: Qu Yuan, Sima Qian, Tao Yuanming, Xie Lingyun. Knowledge of classical Chinese is assumed; secondary readings may be in a variety of languages.

“Reduce, remove, repair” has recently been proposed as a strategy through which the devastating effects of climate change and colonialism on earth systems, biodiversity, and human societies  might still be reversed. In this course, we will explore a range of representations and practices related to “repair” in China, thinking about how we might repair our understanding of ourselves and of our relation to the world. Our first task will be to unpack basic concepts--repair, environment, nature, world--in relation to one another. We will consider literary, philosophical, and artistic works that question the notion that humans are separate from nature or the environment, and will study the specific means whereby different literary and visual genres call attention to elements--plants, water, air, earth, humans--in need of repair.

Throughout the course, we will ask the following questions: How do we orient ourselves toward repair as a mode of living? What would our daily life look like—how would it change--if it were guided by the aspiration to repair rather than by the desire to progress, expand, extract, and conquer? What can help generate the wish to repair?

Our materials will include ancient Chinese philosophical and literary texts and landscape paintings; Chinese contemporary literary works, artworks, and documentary films; and theoretical texts in environmental humanities.

Finally, our course will also have a practical component, as we will try to learn about “reparative” projects in Chicago and surroundings and undertake at least two field trips to familiarize ourselves with them.

This course engages with the various techniques and practices associated with sound in Japanese culture, ranging from the 18th century through the contemporary era. The media covered will include literature, language reform movements, theater, cinema (both silent and sound), recorded music, radio broadcasting, manga, video games and anime. We will also read recent sound-oriented approaches to literary and cultural studies from scholars from both Japan and elsewhere. All readings will be in English.

The history of Maoist China is usually told as a sequence of political campaigns: land and marriage reform, nationalization of industry, anti-rightist campaign, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, etc. Yet for the majority of the Chinese population, the promise of socialism was as much about material improvements as it was about political change: a socialist revolution would bring about “two-storey brick houses, electric lights and telephones” (loushang louxia, diandeng dianhua), new work regimes and new consumption patterns. If we want to understand what socialism meant for different groups of people, we have to look at the "new objects" of  socialist modernity, at changes in dress codes and apartment layouts, at electrification and city planning – or at the absence of such changes and the persistence of older patterns of material life under a new, socialist veneer. At the methodological level, we ask how Material Culture and Everyday Life approaches help us understand the lives of people who wrote little and were rarely written about. How do we read people's life experiences out of the material record of their lives?

Worldwide, women do about 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly. Women’s underpaid work at home and in industry subsidized the early stages of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain, early twentieth-century Japan, and contemporary China, and women’s unpaid contributions to their households enable employers worldwide to keep wages low. We know, at least in outline, how women came to carry double burdens in Europe and North America, but little research has been done so far about this process in East Asia. In this course, we will discuss when and how China, Japan, and Korea developed a division of labor in which most wage work was gendered male and reproductive work was marked female. Are current divisions of labor between men and women rooted in local cultures, or are they the result of industrial capitalist development? How do divisions of labor differ between the three East Asian countries, and how did developments in one East Asian country affect others?

In a recent essay on teaching gender in China, the historian Gail Hershatter writes: "First, we need to disaggregate the subject of 'women.' Which women, where, and when? Urban, rural, old, young, elite, poor, northern, southern, Han, non-Han—each of these terms fractures the unitary category 'women,' continually forcing us to ask who, and what, we are talking about. Disaggregation also reminds us that revolutions, like other social processes, are uneven, fragmentary, messy, and fragile. 'Women' is not the only category that should be scrutinized in this way—'China' itself is another shorthand category begging for disassembly and analysis."

 Hershatter’s invitation to “disaggregate” and “disassemble” both the subject of “women” and “China” constitutes an important methodological premise for this course, which asks which women wrote in late Imperial and modern China, where and when they did so, and perhaps most crucially, why. We’ll keep in mind the imperative to “disaggregate,” then, but will also consider the ways in which women (and men) reimagined the collectivity of women and the concept of “women’s literature” (funü wenxue) in order to stake out a position in the cultural sphere. In sum, how did Chinese women use literature to redefine what it meant to be a woman, and what was their role (both of women and of literature) in the major social and political upheavals and in the reformist and revolutionary movements of their day?

Readings include essays, poetry, diaries and fiction by women writers from the 12th to the 21th century in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. All assigned readings are in English translation, but students who read Chinese are encouraged to read the original texts.