Undergraduate

This course examines Japanese film history from the perspective of youth: films made for, about, and by young people. Starting with 1933’s Dragnet Girl and moving through 2003’s Bright Future, we will study a wide range of films dealing with juvenile delinquency, and ask how the bad boys and girls of the screen reflect and embody the sociocultural crises, ideological debates, and aesthetic aspirations of their times. Young people have long been the Japanese film industry’s largest (and most economically important) demographic group. The ways in which young characters are used to hail, edify, and/or entertain their counterparts in the audience will be closely considered. Readings will mostly be secondary scholarship, but where appropriate we will address contemporaneous fiction and non-fiction texts as well. All readings are in English and available on Chalk.

This course examines dynamic interactions between law and society in China, Japan, and Korea from 1700 through 1950s. The course deals with law as a realm of high politics especially in an age of nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism, but it focuses on family and communal relations, gender and sexuality, and crime and punishment in relations to law because these topics can highlight not only theoretical discussions of law in domestic and international politics but also down-to-earth practices of law and societal implications that followed them. To consider the historically rich experiences of law in East Asian societies, we engage with a body of scholarly works on these topics, actual codes and cases, and novels and films. The aim of the course is to help us to understand how significantly East Asia has had its own local experiences of law that were simultaneously entangled with Western legal thoughts and practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All readings are available in English.

In this course we will read a number of works by renowned Confucian, Shinto, and the Nativist scholars in Japan's early modern period, while concurrently reading the major historiographical debates about them.  We will also study the social context of these thinkers in which they attempted to define the core of Japan's cultural identity. 

Autobiographical writings have thrived in modern China. Why this is the case and what the writing of one's life has meant at different moments in twentieth-century China are among the questions that this course addresses. We will examine various forms of writings, including real and fictional diaries and memoirs by Chinese intellectuals from the 1910s to the 1980s, and will consider in which ways these texts qualify as autobiography, thematically, structurally, and linguistically. Theoretical and scholarly studies on autobiography and diary will help orient our discussions toward issues of gender, space, time, and performativity.

This course introduces the basic narrative and critical discourses of the history of early modern Japan, roughly from 1500 to 1868.  The course examines the emergence of the central power that unified feudal domains and explores processes of social, cultural, and political changes that transformed Japan into a "realm under Heaven."  Some scholars consider early modern Japan as the source of an indigenous birth of capitalism, industrialism, and also of Japan’s current economic vitality, while others see a bleak age of feudal oppression and isolation.  We will explore both sides of the debate and examine the age of many contradictions.

This undergraduate course examines the cinematic representation of modern Korean history, politics, and gender in South Korean films, aiming to establish a comprehensive understanding of Korean film history from its early stage to its contemporary global recognition. While proceeding chronologically, we will interrogate key problematic subjects in South Korean cinema such as gender politics, the discourse of modernity, the representation of historical and political events, and practices of film culture and industry. The film texts examined in this course include not only break-though masterpieces of prominent film auteurs but also popular genre films that enjoyed box-office success. Through these examples, we will examine how the most influential art form in South Korea has recognized, interpreted, and resolved current societal issues through creative endeavor. The course also seeks to establish a balance between understanding Korean cinema as both a reservoir of historical memory and as an example of evolving world cinema. Being presented with methodological issues from film studies in each week’s film reading, including the question of archives, national cinema discourse, feminist film theory, auteurism, and genre studies, students in this course will learn to analyze Korean filmic texts not only as a way to understand the particularity of Korean cinema and history but also as a frontier of cinematic language in the broader film history. All the materials are available in English and no knowledge of Korean language is required.

May be taken as a sequence or individually. This sequence on the civilizations of China, Japan, and Korea emphasizes major transformation in these cultures and societies from their inception to the present.

This seminar (required for all East Asian majors) is intended to expose students to the different disciplines and areas represented in the study of East Asia at the University of Chicago. Students should take this chance to meet fellow majors in the various areas of East Asian Studies and to familiarize themselves with the work of faculty members. Third year students should be already thinking about finding a topic and a faculty advisor for a senior thesis. Conventionally, the Concentrators Seminar is organized around a theme. The goal of this interdisciplinary seminar is to expose students to a range of important problems and methods across time and space in the study of China, Japan and Korea. Guest lecturers and reading assigned by different University of Chicago faculty members are an integral part of the course. Students work on an individual research project tailored to their own interests, which they may subsequently develop into a B.A paper. This course is offered every year; however the quarter may change.Religion and Politics of East Asia.

This course takes a comparative approach to the terms “modernism” and
“modernity.” Instead of reading these terms as originating in the West and subsequently
travelling to the East, we will explore “modernism” as a plural and globally constituted
literary practice. In doing so, we will also challenge the literary and real categories of “East”
and “West.” Reading the roles and imaginations of China, North India, and the
(differentiated) West in a variety of texts, we will question the aesthetics and politics of
representation, of dynamic cultural exchange, and of the global individual in the modern
literary world.

An examination of the discipline of history as practiced in Japan from ancient times to the modern. Readings in translation of works such as the Kojiki, Okagami, Taiheiki, and others will be used to explore both the Japanese past and the manner of interpretation of that past.