This course will survey the history of China from the late Shang dynasty (c. 1200 B.C.) through the end of the Qin dynasty (207 B.C.). We will explore both traditional and recently unearthed sources, and will take a multi-disciplinary approach.
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.
What is a ghost? How and why are ghosts represented in particular forms in a particular culture at particular historical moments? This course will explore the complex meanings, both literal and figurative, of ghosts and spirits in Chinese culture across a range of genres: the ghost story, opera, visual imagery, and film. Issues to be explored include: 1) the confrontation of individual mortality and collective anxieties over the loss of the historical past; 2) the relationship between the supernatural, gender, and sexuality; 3) the visualization of ghosts and spirits in art, theater, and cinema; 4) the politics of ghosts in modern times. Course readings will be in English translation, and no prior background is required, but students who read Chinese will be encouraged to work with sources in the original. This year's class will be designed to take full advantage of special Chicago events in spring 2014, notably the exhibition "Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture" at the Smart Museum, and Mary Zimmerman's new production of The White Snake at the Goodman Theater.
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 will offer a survey of contemporary media culture in Japan and an introduction to leading media theory and criticism. Centered primarily on televisual and internet media, we will also consider related media forms that feature screens or interface displays, such as mobile phones, game media, etc. However, rather than imagining these things as part of an abstract notion of a national popular culture, we will investigate the type of media environment and industrial practices from which they emerge and contribute to. Each week will cover a different theme – and often introduce a new media object – but the course will be organized around drawing connections between these instances and how audiences interpret and interact with these media as part of a more general environment.
Often incorporating elements of the ludic, the lewd, the grotesque and the ecstatic in its expression, the Japanese religious landscape offers a rich and variegated terrain of ideas and practices that cannot easily be reduced to separate and distinct religious traditions (Shinto, Buddhism, Daoism). This course, in providing a survey of Japanese religions from premodern times to the present, will focus specifically on aspects of Japanese religiosity that not only play with these traditional boundaries, but also represent forms of “play” in and of themselves – from dance, story-telling, visual media, to ritual. How has “play” helped shape the socioreligious landscape of the archipelago? How can we understand religious modes of expression that call into question the very nature of quotidian reality? What social significance do these forms carry back into our daily lives? Finally, what are the implications for our conception of “religion” by understanding it as a form of “play”? The class will be conducted in a lecture/discussion format and will consist of close reading and discussion of texts assigned. Prior knowledge of Japanese history or religious thought is helpful but not a prerequisite for this course.
This course explores the society and culture of Japan during the period of “total war” from 1937 to 1945. Readings will be divided between recent scholarly literature and a rich and diverse body of primary sources (in translation) including diaries, literature, and memoirs, state propaganda, school textbooks, etc. Each student will be required to write a focused research paper of approximately 15 pages on a topic of their choice.
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.
