Graduate

This discussion-based course aims to familiarize EALC PhD students with different aspects of the profession of East Asian Studies. This quarter we will focus on the history of Area Studies through a critical examination of major Anglophone journals in the field. Together we will select the flagship journals in everyone's subfield of study and examine inaugural issues and key debates within their immediate historical contexts. In addition, we will consider how Area Studies has been developing in East Asia.

The recent popularization of “true crime” in film, television shows, and podcasts has prompted critical discussions about the ethics of mixing documentary with entertainment and fact with fiction, as well as concerns about whose narratives are given public attention as others are ignored. Using these considerations as a starting point, this course examines some of the mainstays of the genre of “true crime”—scandal, violence, disaster, law, and the supernatural—in fiction and theater in early modern Japan in order to trace the fluctuating relationship between news, fiction, and performance over the course of the Edo period. This course examines the many ways that works of literature and stage were already deeply invested in these tropes of rumor, scandal, sensation, spectacle, and documentary long before the advent of regularly circulating printed newspapers in Meiji Japan, as well as how these existing configurations of sense and sensationalism informed later developments in media and fiction. The goal of this course is for students to gain not only a breadth of knowledge about various literary and theatrical forms in early modern Japan but also a critical awareness of how early modern spectacles of infamy or violence intersected with categories of class, gender, sexuality, and disability to transform some figures into targets of sympathy and others into paragons of villainy or horror. 

All course readings will be available in English. The course is designed for undergraduate students but graduate participation is welcome with advanced consultation.

Each week will focus on a particular sense or sensation (sound, touch, horror, wonder, etc.) in works of premodern Japanese theater and fiction, paying particular attention to performance (broadly defined to include noh, kabuki, and puppet theater as well as comic storytelling and spectacle shows) as a public site for the exploration of intimacy and alienation, the circulation of feelings, and the staging of somatic difference. Considering, for example, anti-theatrical bias and discourses of contagion, scenes of possession and physical transformation, and the psychologizing of emotion and the senses, the course will engage with theories of embodiment, emotions, disability, and wonder. All readings will be available in English.

This course investigates literary strategies in China through which material things are depicted and animated. Our emphasis will be on reading primary sources about objects up through the 18th century, but we’ll also incorporate approaches from anthropology, the history of material culture and technology, and art history in a comparative context.  Genres to be covered include the ode on things, the it-biography, tales of the strange, the vernacular novel, handbooks for connoisseurs and collectors, paintings, illustrated books, and decorative objects.Some previous background in Chinese literature, history, or art history would be helpful but is not required. All materials will be available in English but students with classical Chinese will be encouraged to read materials in the original when feasible.  

This course introduces students to modern Japanese literature through the form of the novel. We begin in the late-nineteenth century, when a new generation of writers sought to come to terms with this world historical form, and end in the twenty-first, with writers trying to sustain the form through graphic art and digital media. Along the way, we will consider some of the key debates that have structured the novel's evolution: between elite and mass forms, truth and fiction, art and politics, self and other, native and foreign. The course also looks at how the form has evolved in response to shifting modes of cultural production and shifting patterns of literary consumption. Authors covered may include Natsume Soseki, Yokomitsu Ri'ichi, Hayashi Fumiko, Oe Kenzaburo, Takahashi Takako, and Tawada Yoko. All works will be read in English.

In this class, we will discuss the role that comparison plays as a key method for studying East Asian cultures. We will explore ways of making comparison and reflect on our own habits of comparative thinking. What is comparable and what is not? How can comparison reveal otherwise hidden connections? How might comparison inflict violence on the subjects that we study? How can we compare responsibly, sensitively, and creatively? We will focus on three themes: race, media, and language. We will explore how their interconnections present new opportunities and challenges for comparative thinking when studying Japan, Korea, and China from a global perspective. In lieu of a final paper, each student will develop a critical reflection journal responding to these questions by examining selected cases in a medium of choice (such as handwritten pages, podcast, short film, blog, poetry). All classes will be divided into seminar sessions and workshop sessions. In a seminar session, we will discuss a selection of literary materials, films, and recent theoretical texts produced in interdisciplinary fields including cultural studies, media studies, and postcolonial studies in East Asian contexts in the premodern and modern eras. In a workshop session, we will discuss new portions of students’ journal-in-progress (which will be circulated beforehand). The goal is to help each student develop and modify their own approach to drawing insightful comparison. This class welcomes EALC majors and minors, MAPH students, and other students who are interested in this topic. 

In this class, we will explore a variety of environments and ecological systems portrayed in Chinese short stories in the 20th and 21st centuries, ranging from forests to media ecology. What do fictional tales tell us about the relationship between human beings and nature and the interaction between people inhabiting different types of environment (e.g. the urban versus the rural)? How is ecocriticism entangled with literary criticism? How can we gain a new perspective on the genre of short fiction by considering techniques for storytelling in ecological terms? We will read stories written by famous Chinese writers including Lu Xun, Yu Hua, and Mo Yan (the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012) in conjunction with a selection of theoretical texts. This class welcomes EALC majors and minors, MAPH students, and other students who are interested in this topic. No prior knowledge of Chinese is needed.

This course studies a selection of popular Korean song lyrics, treating them under the rubric of poetry. Its prerequisite is Korean proficiency of the 4th-year level and above and the student should have the Instructor’s approval in advance.

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.

This hands-on reading and research course aims to give graduate students the linguistic skills needed to locate, read, and analyze archival documents from the People's Republic of China. We will begin by discussing the functions and structure of Chinese archives at the central, provincial, and county level. Next we will read and translate sample documents drawn from different archives. These may include police reports, personnel files, internal memos, minutes of meetings, etc. Our aim here is to understand the conventions of a highly standardized communication system - for example, how does a report or petition from an inferior to a superior office differ from a top-down directive or circular, or from a lateral communication between adminstrations of equal rank? We will also read "sub-archival" documents, i.e. texts that are of interest to the historian but did not make it into state archives, such as letters, diaries, contracts, and private notebooks. The texts we will read are selected to cast light on the everyday life of "ordinary" people in the Maoist period. The target group for the course are graduate students and advanced undergraduates with good Chinese reading skills.