Graduate

The socialist period (for our purposes here, c. 1949-1980) fundamentally transformed the institutions of Chinese social and economic life. Marriage and family were redefined; rural communities were reorganized on a collective basis; private property in land and other means of production was abolished. Industrialization created a new urban working class, whose access to welfare, consumer goods, and political rights depended to a large extent on their membership in work units (danwei). Migration between city and countryside almost came to a halt, and rural and urban society developed in different directions. This course will focus on the concrete details of how this society functioned. How did state planning work? What was it like to work in a socialist factory? What role did money and consumption play in a planned economy? Our readings are in English, but speakers of Chinese are encouraged to use Chinese materials (first-hand sources, if they can be found) for their final papers. All readings will be posted on Canvas.  

The course will cover a selection of works in biji and zaji form from the Song to Qing dynasties. Part of the interest of the form is its inclusiveness, which has made it hard to place on maps of genre. These works include scientific investigation, social commentary, travel accounts, classical interpretation, personal reminiscences, tales and gossip, art appreciation, responses to poetry, and many other things, combined in an apparently associative manner. We will read both for topical interest and for understanding of the form.

This quarter we will read selected tales from Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異, Pu Songling's蒲松齡seventeenth-century masterpiece. Problems to be addressed include how to deal with allusions (diangu 典故) and engage with period/ individual style in literary Chinese. We will work on not only understanding the meaning of the text but also on producing stage by stage polished English translations.

Selected readings in pre-modern Chinese literature from the first millennium B.C.E. to the end of the imperial period. The course covers important works in topics ranging from philosophy, history and religion to poetry, fiction and drama. Specific content varies by instructor.

This course will consist of the close reading and discussion of primary texts (in translation) of the Chan and Zen Buddhism of China and Japan, with a few secondary descriptions of Zen institutions and cultural influences. This will be done both with an eye to the historical development of these schools of thought and practice within the context of East Asian Buddhism in general, and for whatever transhistorical valences we care to derive from the texts.

Timed to coincide with the Busan Biennale's Chicago Chapter, a series of events and exchanges with artists and organizers of the project, this interdisciplinary class will examine the context of the biennale and respond to works in the show-- giving special attention to the interplay between sound, text, and image. Using Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky's Picture at an Exhibition as inspiration, artists, musicians, and writers from South Korea and around the world were invited to respond to both the city of Busan and to each other's work. Similarly, we will likewise read, listen, and look at the work and create projects while considering our own context here in the city of Chicago. Students will be asked to complete one short writing assignment, one short creative piece, and develop a larger project. Weekly reading assignments will be discussed, drawing mainly from the Biennale reader and other artist writings that will guide our thinking about artistic practice across mediums and the nexus of artistic writing and conceptual art more broadly. What kind of artworks will emerge from this encounter with an international biennale? What is the meaning of interdisciplinarity and experimental form when conventional forms of exhibition making that have been so upended by the pandemic? These are just a few of the questions that will guide our inquiry during the seminar.

This course surveys new archaeological evidence for the early development of Chinese landscape representations from the 5th century BCE to the 10th century CE, and explores the relationship between such representations and various cultural and religious trends. Possible topics include the origins of landscape representation, religious significance of landscape images, construction of landscape environment, and landscape aesthetic and the notion of transcendence. Students are encouraged to explore these and other topics, and are expected to produce papers based on focused research.

Icons belong to the most important category of sacred objects in Buddhism, and they were indispensable for transmitting the religion across East Asia. The ontological status of icons, however, remained polemical throughout most of the religion’s premodern history. While scholars in religious studies have since the 1960s been attentive to the ritual and cultic functionality of Buddhist icons, art historians did not move past style-oriented methodologies and fully engage Buddhist icons as such until the 1990s. This course investigates different methodologies devised by scholars in the past to study Buddhist icons with various theoretical premises and from diverse historical perspectives and focuses. We will pay particular attention to how the field, Chinese Buddhist art history, bears those different approaches to Buddhist icons in its development of the past decades. 

How does architecture engage people visually, physically, or spatially? In what ways can we talk about architecture acting upon viewers, cultivating their bodily knowledge and shaping their spatial experiences? In a figurative sense, this course explores ways in which architecture is not confined as the backdrop of a performance but a critical constituent of it. Yet, rather than using the power of “performance” only as an explanatory metaphor, the course takes it as an essential quality of architecture, investigating what constitutes Chinese traditional architecture’s performativity—its agentic power that engages and thus transforms viewers both affectively and intellectually. The goal is to situate China’s architectural tradition in an unconventional framework of analysis to explore issues, materials, topics, etc. that have thus far not been fully or appropriately studied. Language proficiency in classical Chinese is required.