An exploration of the writings of Lu Xun (1881-1936), widely considered as the greatest Chinese writer of the past century. We will read short stories, essays, prose poetry and personal letters against the backdrop of the political and cultural upheavals of early 20th century China and in dialogue with important English-language scholarly works.
This course will provide an overview of Chinese unearthed documents, beginning with the oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty and the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou dynasty, and then concluding with bamboo and silk manuscripts of the Warring States, Qin and Han dynasties. By reading selections from these materials, we will seek to gain a general sense of both how they were produced and used at the time and also how their modern study has evolved.
This class explores the late imperial fascination with the boundaries between reality and illusion, genuine and counterfeit, self and role. Focusing on the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century—a period marked by both tremendous commercial growth and devastating political turmoil—we will trace the development of a discourse that at once imposes and seeks to overcome these categories of real and fake. In addition to readings from drama, fiction, and poetry, materials will include manuals on forgeries and scams, dream encyclopedias, designs for imaginary gardens, and guidebooks to fantastical realms. All readings available in English, but students with Chinese reading ability will be encouraged to read the original texts.
As Japanese leaders in the mid 19th century faced the threat of colonization at the hands of the Western powers, they launched a project to achieve “Civilization and Enlightenment,” quickly transforming Japan into a global power that possessed its own empire. In the process fiction became a site for both political engagement and retreat. A civilized country, it was argued, was supposed to boast “literature” as one of its Fine Arts. This literature was charged with representing the inner life of its characters, doing so in a modern national language that was supposed to be a transparent medium of communication. Between the 1880s and the early 1900s, a new language, new literary techniques, and a new set of ideologies were constructed to produce the “self” in novels and short stories. As soon as these new practices were developed, however, they became the objects of parody and ironic deconstruction. Reading key literary texts from the 1880s through the 1930s, as well as recent scholarship, this course will re-trace this historical and literary unfolding, paying special attention to the relationship between language and subjectivity. All readings will be in English.
China's shift from a predominantly rural country to an urban majority is one of the greatest social and demographic transformations in world history. This course begins with the roots of this story in the early modern history of China's cities and traces it through a series of momentous upheavals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will learn about how global ideas and practices contributed to efforts to make Chinese cities "modern," but also how urban experiences have been integral to the meaning of modernity itself. We will discuss urban space, administration, public health, commerce and industry, transportation, foreign relations, and material culture. In addition to tackling these important topics in urban history and tracing the general development of Chinese cities over time, another primary concern of our course will be the place of urban history in English-language scholarship on Chinese history more broadly. We will track this development from Max Weber's observations on Chinese cities through the rise of "China-centered" scholarship in the 1970s through the "global turn" of the 2000s. During the course students will develop the skills necessary for writing an effective historiography paper, i.e., doing background research, writing annotated bibliographies, and using citation management software. Students will put these skills to work by writing a critical historiographical review of scholarship on a topic of their choice.
This class is an introduction to the forms, practices, and meanings of dance in China and the diaspora from ancient times to the present day. Through readings, videos, class demonstrations, and performances, we will explore the reconstruction of court dance in early China; Central Asian dance and dancers in the medieval imagination; the development of operatic movement in the late imperial period; the introduction and transformation of concert dance in the first half of the 20th century; socialist dance and the model ballets of the Cultural Revolution; folk dance and PRC ethno-nationalist discourse; the post-reform transnational avant-garde; ballroom dancing and everyday urban street life; Han revivalism, Shen Yun, and “classical Chinese dance” in the 21st century. Across these varied materials we will ask: what do we mean when we speak of dance, and what makes a dance Chinese? All materials in English; no background required.
What is a ghost? How and why are ghosts represented in particular forms in a particular culture at particular historical moments and how do these change as stories travel between cultures? How and why is traditional ghost lore reconfigured in the contemporary world? This course will explore the complex meanings, both literal and figurative, of ghosts and the fantastic in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tales, plays, and films. Issues to be explored include: 1) the relationship between the supernatural, gender, and sexuality; 2) the confrontation of death and mortality; 3) collective anxieties over the loss of the historical past; 4) and the visualization of the invisible through art, theater, and cinema.
Anyang is one of the most important archaeological sites in China. The discoveries of inscribed oracle bones, the royal cemetery, clusters of palatial structures, and industrial-scale craft production precincts have all established that the site was indeed the last capital of the Shang dynasty recorded in traditional historiography. With almost continuous excavations since the late 1920s, work at Anyang has in many ways shaped and defined Chinese archaeology and the study of Early Bronze Age China. This course intends to examine the history of research, important archaeological finds, and the role of Anyang studies in the field of Chinese archaeology. While the emphasis is on archaeological finds and the related research, this course will also attempt to define Anyang in the modern social and cultural contexts in terms of world heritage, national and local identity, and the looting and illegal trade of antiquities.
Note(s): Open to undergraduates with consent of instructor.
The course examines the multiple religious traditions spread across the Japanese archipelago, their tenets, rituals, values, and their intimate ties to literature, politics, social structures and economy. The goal will be to arrive at a substantive understanding of Japanese religions and the state of the field of religious studies, and explore potential directions for future research. We will consider both the openness of Japanese religion to incorporate new ideas and its proclivity for relational and amalgamative theories and practices, and also cases of outright rejection of certain Sinitic and pan-Asian ideas. Accordingly, this course will focus not only on the religions of Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism, but also their interactions with other traditions such as Onmyōdō, Shugendō, and popular religion (minkan shūkyō).
Each week we will read a recent monograph and analyze the main arguments and its methodological contribution to the field of religious studies and Japanese religion. Students will be asked to reflect critically on the central arguments of the books, as well as their discussion of doctrine, practice and cultural trends examined in the readings. The topics that we will discuss each week are diverse and include: Esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō), original enlightenment thought (hongaku), religious readings of literature (narrative and poetry), visual culture in Pure Land Buddhism, Kuroda Toshio’s Marxist and political theory, State Shinto and nationalism, cross-cultural transmissions between Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen, mountain worship and maritime religiosity, and Japan’s imagination of South Asia. We will pay close attention to how scholars use various methodologies and theories in their examinations of religious phenomena, such as ritual theory, literary and critical theory, feminist and queer theory, among others. Over the course of the quarter, students will build their own methodological and theoretical toolkits and put them into practice by writing a research paper.
