Graduate

This course examines the ways in which authors, editors, and public intellectuals redefined the social function of literature and sought to build communities of readers in early 20th century China. We will combine close readings of texts with a survey of important institutions and concepts, familiarizing ourselves with the literary circles and associations, the journals and publishers, and the notions of self and community that shaped literary practices in a tumultuous period. How are we to rethink the relationship between literary writing—per se a highly individualized and often solitary activity—with the forms of sociality, collaborative practices, and global networks of translation in which it was historically embedded? What are the visions of community that the texts themselves sought to promote? What are, in the final analysis, the relevant contexts for the study of modern Chinese literature? Our explorations will be both historical and historiographical, and will touch on the main debates that shape modern Chinese literary studies today.

"Feminine space" denotes an architectural or pictorial space that is perceived, imagined, and represented as a woman. Unlike an isolated female portrait or an individual female symbol, a feminine space is a spatial entity: an artificial world composed of landscape, vegetation, architecture, atmosphere, climate, color, fragrance, light, and sound, as well as selected human occupants and their activities. This course traces the construction of this space in traditional Chinese art (from the second to the eighteenth centuries) and the social/political implications of this constructive process.

This course examines a selection of literary and cinematic texts that engage with the Korean War and the various political, ideological, and cultural divisions that occurred against the backdrop of the Cold War. The thematic focus of the course is placed on the family as an institution and experience, as well as the generational differences with which the war, division and family matters were experienced.   We will discuss texts with a view to exploring the formative and derivative effects of the war and its divisions upon the individual self-fashioning amidst disasters, crises and unavoidable dilemmas. Discussion will pay special attention to the ways in which the dynamics between the trope of family, a rhetorically unifying force, and the effects of generational difference, an often divisive factor, reinforced and/or challenged the conventional ideological discourses on the Korean War and Korea’s various divisions. All the film and literary texts chosen for the course have English translation/English subtitles.

Increasingly, historians of modern China have begun to turn to the complex decades between the fall of China's last dynasty and the establishment of the PRC, not merely to better understand the emergence of Communism or the fate of imperial traditions, but as a significant period in its own right. In addition to examining the major social and political changes of this period, this seminar course will explore the emergence of new cultural, artistic, and literary genres in a time notorious for its turbulence. Readings explore  both new and classic interpretations of the period, as well as recent scholarship which benefits from expanding access to Chinese archives. Students should expect regular short writing assignments. The class will culminate with each student choosing either a historigraphical final paper or a close reading of a primary source in light of the issues explored in the course.

This course is focused on the changing representations of nature and the historical significance of cultural landscapes in early modern Japan. We will explore texts written by poets, travelers, and scholars and examine how poems, illustrations, and other cultural and visual artifacts generated new meanings and aesthetic sensibilities, and inscribed histories into places. Prior knowledge of early modern Japanese history is recommended.

In recent years, the project of the artist's monograph has been subjected to criticism and analysis, yet the single-artist study remains important to our discipline. These methodological reflections should be taken seriously in the case of East Asia, where notions of the (primarily male) artist or painter and his place in society prior to the twentieth century must be evaluated on their own terms. Drawing on both premodern and modern cases, this course proposes to do just that, reading primary texts where possible and evaluating a range of recent monographs. When and how do European and American tropes of the artist enter the picture? How do ethnic and regional background, gender, medium, and socioeconomic status complicate the narration of the Asian and Asian American artist? How well does art historical writing accommodate the type of visual knowledge that can only be gained by in-depth contemplation of the artist's works? For the final paper, students are encouraged to present a case study or comparison of their choice drawn from East Asia and beyond.

This seminar serves as an introduction to theories of media and mediation in the context of scholarship on East Asia. “Media” has come to be a ubiquitous term in how we think not just about technologies of communication and dissemination, but also about literature, music, film, and other forms of cultural production. In this course we will look at how the concept has been taken up in recent work on China, Japan, and Korea, and raise questions about how this work has drawn on media theories from elsewhere; how it has sought to develop or recover locally inflected theories of media; and how it is we might distinguish between the two. Our task, then, will be to consider how media theory and media history have been done, but also to speculate on how they can and should be done within an area studies framework.