Graduate

How have insects affected ways of knowing and relating to the world?

This course opens a dialogue between insects and Japanese audiovisual cultures, including fiction, poetry, visual art, manga, anime, and film. We aim to address the important and profound challenge that recent trends in animal studies, environmental humanities, and eco-criticism pose to received ways of studying human cultures and societies. The challenge lies in offering alternatives to the entrenched reliance on a nature-culture divide, which gives culture explanatory preference over nature. In the case of Japan and insects, for instance, there exists a fairly significant body of scholarship on how Japanese people respond to, interact with, and represent insects, and yet priority is generally given to culture, and Japan is treated monolithically. To offer alternatives to this monolithic culturalism, in this course we will (a) open dialogue between culture accounts of insects and scientific accounts and (b) explore different forms of media offering different milieus where human animals and more-than-human insects come into relation without assuming the ascendency of one over the other.

This course explores the predominant significance of materials, rather than image or style, in conveying the intended meaning of works of art and in manifesting artists’ aesthetic judgement or social critique. These materials can be natural or artificial, personal or generic. They are “selected” either collectively or individually to become the major means of making art over a significant period in history or an artist's career. What are the sources of power of such materials? How are they transformed into works of art? What are their connections with technology, environment, economy, society, religion, culture, and personal experience? Students are expected to conduct individual studies on selected cases (from any time in Chinese history) and to actively respond to other presentations.

This course defines “Chinese state” as a state that uses Chinese Script to define its legal institutions. A rich variety of this kind of state can be observed in the history of East Asia, showing a wide range of different ethnic, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. The objective of this course is to highlight the fundamental breaks in the history of these Chinese states, which often hide under a thick curtain of linguistic continuity. Though contemporary Chinese states are undoubtedly rooted in history, this course avoids diminishing the history of the former Chinese states to a pre-history of any contemporary Chinese state. This course is divided into part I (Autumn term) and part II (Winter term). Part I concentrates on the first Chinese states, covering a period when written history in East Asia was still limited to Chinese history. Interstate relations were thus limited to international relations between Chinese states or to Chinese state relations with states without indigenous script systems. This period commences in the early Bronze Age and reaches the seventh century CE. The course will show that the legacy of script, language and concepts did not limit the plurality of legal institutions, which may be considered a natural result of differing socio-economic needs. Part II starts from the eighth century. At that time, the state of Tang became the first Chinese state for which we have evidence that it concluded equal international treaties with non-Chinese states.

This course defines “Chinese state” as a state that uses Chinese Script to define its legal institutions. A rich variety of this kind of state can be observed in the history of East Asia, showing a wide range of different ethnic, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. The objective of this course is to highlight the fundamental breaks in the history of these Chinese states, which often hide under a thick curtain of linguistic continuity. Though contemporary Chinese states are undoubtedly rooted in history, this course avoids diminishing the history of the former Chinese states to a pre-history of any contemporary Chinese state. This course is divided into part I (Autumn term) and part II (Winter term). Part I concentrates on the first Chinese states, covering a period when written history in East Asia was still limited to Chinese history. Interstate relations were thus limited to international relations between Chinese states or to Chinese state relations with states without indigenous script systems. This period commences in the early Bronze Age and reaches the seventh century CE. The course will show that the legacy of script, language and concepts did not limit the plurality of legal institutions, which may be considered a natural result of differing socio-economic needs. Part II starts from the eighth century. At that time, the state of Tang became the first Chinese state for which we have evidence that it concluded equal international treaties with non-Chinese states.

The great Chinese-Manchu novel “Honglou meng” (ca. 1750) has been assigned one major author, Cao Xueqin, whose life has been the subject of much investigation. But before 1922 little was known about Cao, and interpreters of the novel were forced to make headway solely on the basis of textual clues. The so-called “Three Commentators” edition (“Sanjia ping Shitou ji”) shows these readers at their creative, polemical, and far-fetched best. We will be reading the first 80 chapters of the novel and discussing its reception in the first 130 years of its published existence (1792-1922), with special attention to hermeneutical strategies and claims of authorial purpose. Familiarity with classical Chinese required.

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.

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.

The course is a systematic introduction to pre-modern and early-modern texts written in classical Japanese (bungo or kogo), the standard written language in Japan up to the beginning of the twentieth century. We will learn and absorb the fundamentals of classical Japanese grammar and engage with some of the core grammatical problematics of the language. Throughout the course students will gain a firm foundation in how the language is constructed, increase their comprehension of the language’s vocabulary, and will familiarize themselves with original texts in prose and poetry alike, including narrative fiction (monogatari), anecdotes (setsuwa), essays (zuihitsu), and traditional Japanese poems (waka). The goal is to acquire a firm foundation in the classical language and to be able to read pre-modern texts with the help of a dictionary, for the purpose of academic research.

The course is a systematic introduction to pre-modern and early-modern texts written in classical Japanese (bungo or kogo), the standard written language in Japan up to the beginning of the twentieth century. We will learn and absorb the fundamentals of classical Japanese grammar and engage with some of the core grammatical problematics of the language. Throughout the course students will gain a firm foundation in how the language is constructed, increase their comprehension of the language’s vocabulary, and will familiarize themselves with original texts in prose and poetry alike, including narrative fiction (monogatari), anecdotes (setsuwa), essays (zuihitsu), and traditional Japanese poems (waka). The goal is to acquire a firm foundation in the classical language and to be able to read pre-modern texts with the help of a dictionary, for the purpose of academic research.

The course explores a central aspect of Chinese contemporary culture, namely the process of transposing new and old stories from the page to the stage to the screen. In addition, the class seeks to expand the concept of adaptation to investigate how cinema appropriates and repurposes other media, and why specific intermedial genres emerge more prominently at certain historical conjunctures. The films we will watch encompass three genres: comedy, opera film, and documentary, each respectively characterized by thematic and formal engagements with television, regional theater, and screen-based news. Some of the screenings will be followed by discussions with filmmakers, in person or on Zoom.