Undergraduate

From premodern to modern societies, human beings have been producing material objects that support or enrich their lives in particular social and cultural expressions. In this course, we will investigate the history of craft production and discuss the materials, methods, contexts, and meanings of skilled craft in East Asia. The making of material objects can take numerous forms, and usually involve multiple social groups who rely on different methods of knowing (e.g., tacit or explicit, individually embodied or widely shared). From the imperial and official workshop of early China to the silk weaving household in post-Meiji Japan, and from the handicraft communities in rural China of the twentieth century to the contemporary Korean Hanji paper artist – we will study a diverse range of crafts and consider various ways of making and knowing in relation to creativity and innovation, labor organizations, social structures, as well as statecraft and political power. By engaging with scholarships in history, anthropology, archaeology, art history, material culture, and history of science and technology, we will ask: How are the processes of object-, self-, and world-making intertwined? What is the relationship between making and knowing? How have these different approaches in making and/or knowing evolved alongside broader changes in the history of East Asia? What can they tell us about people’s lives and experiences in a given culture and society?

For the final project, students will have the creative option to remake a historical artifact of East Asia and reflect upon their hands-on experience in this process. All readings will be provided in English.

In this class we will read and analyze the key texts (in English translation) of the two great classical "sinifying" Chinese Buddhist theoretical schools of the Sui, Tang and Song dynasties: Tiantai and Huayan, with special attention to what is arguably their biggest shared innovation: the development of the classical Mahāyāna Buddhist idea of Emptiness (sūnyata) into the "omnicentric" idea that each entity, precisely through its emptiness, is in some sense present in all times and places, is eternal and omnipresent--and the controversies arising from the different justifications and implications advanced by the two schools for this shared doctrine. Readings will include the works of Zhiyi, Zhanran and Zhili from the Tiantai school, and Dushun, Zhiyan, Chengguan and Zongmi. Some basic background in Buddhist thought is recommended. Readings will be in English, but an optional reading group working with the original texts in classical texts will likely also be convened.

The goal of this course is to introduce you to the central themes and texts of classical Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions, both as philosophical works to be evaluated and digested for their doctrinal content and as literary artifacts from a perhaps unfamiliar cultural sphere. This will call for the development of two distinct but related sets of skills, namely, the ability to think through and comprehend philosophical arguments and ideas, and the equally crucial ability to reflect on one's own assumptions as they come into play in one's reaction to and evaluation of those ideas. Readings will include, from the classical period, the Four Books (Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, Analects of Confucius, Mencius), Xunzi, the Book of Changes, and from Sung-Ming Neo-Confucian writings of Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, the Cheng Brothers, Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming.

KORE 21100 is designed for the students who aim to improve their speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills to an advanced level. This course will focus on enhancing speed, accuracy, and comprehension in advanced listening and reading of authentic texts (such as newspaper articles, essays, poems, reports etc.) as well as the refinement of writing skills in various styles. Students will also discuss social and cultural issues in Korea using their analytic skills and knowledge acquired in class.

What happened to Peking Man? Where did rice cultivation begin and who made the first pottery? Why were hoards of bronzes buried and what were they used for? This course will explore themes such as the origins of humans, the beginning of agriculture, early villages and cities, metal technology, ancient writing systems, and the rise of states and civilizations in East Asia. It will also discuss the current state of archaeological research in Asia, and the role of archaeology in nation building and modern geopolitics. The rich resources available in the museums of Chicago will also be explored.

This course examines the history of Sino-Western relations through the perspective of law. Today when we talk about Chinese law in Western contexts, it is often associated with impressions such as human rights abuse and rule of person instead of law. Ever since the early eighteen century, law has assumed a prominent role in the development of Sino-Western relation. Using law as a primary analytical framework, this course surveys a variety of issues arising from Sino-Western interactions during the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. Questions to be discussed include what role does the West, both as political actors and a source of ideology, play in shaping understanding of Chinese law and politics? How did judicial knowledge of business, sovereignty, and family structure change as China entered the global world of nation-states? How did understanding of law help construct and reconstruct notions of ethnicity, marriage, and gender over time in cross-cultural settings? You will be able to understand broad political processes such as modernization, colonization, and globalization, as well as their impact on everyday life. In addition to discussing how Western observers produced knowledge about Chinese law, we also examine the role of law in the Qing Empire’s expansion. The parallel of the two trajectories – one Chinese and one Western – will lead us to reconsider some of the assumptions in cross-cultural studies.

This course aims at an in-depth examination of the “dark side” of modernism through closing readings of various kinds of outsiders, misfits, and sociopaths in literature and film, with a focus on but not limited to East Asia and the 20th Century. If being “social” amounts above all to an acknowledgement of the plurality of human lives and an acquiescence to live together with others, what then does it mean to reject such a fundamental premise? In this course, we will investigate a variety of fictional characters who cannot or will not conform with the implicit conventions of communal life—criminals, lunatics, or simply people who find themselves struggling to sympathize with the feelings of others, etc. In tackling the aforementioned questions, our inquiry will be guided by a range of distinct methodological approaches such as moral philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Readings may include works by Lu Xun, Ma-Xu Weibang, Yi Sang, Kinugasa Teinosuke, Edogawa Rampo, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kōbō, Murakami Haruki, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett, Gaston Leroux, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Jarman. All readings will be in English.

This course explores the intersections between gender, the genre of autobiography, forms of media (written; oral; visual; audiovisual) and historical, cultural, and political contexts of modern Korea. The students read theoretical writings on autobiography and gender as well as selected Korean autobiographical writings while being introduced to Korean historical contexts especially as they relate to practice of publication in a broader sense. The focus of the course is placed on the female gender—on the relationship between Korean women’s life-experience, self-formation, and writing practices in particular while dealing with the gender relationship in general, although some relevant discussions on the male gender proceeds in parallel.

An occupational hazard of the professions of official and scholar in traditional China was banishment (liufang) to a remote province—a punishment that might be handed down for a variety of behaviors. This course will concentrate on writings by noted poets who endured periods of banishment to the empire’s supposedly uncivilized frontiers: Liu Zongyuan, Han Yu, Su Shi, Ji Xiaolan, Lin Zexu, in particular, reading their exile texts together with the older texts that helped them voice their predicament: Qu Yuan, Sima Qian, Tao Yuanming, Xie Lingyun. Knowledge of classical Chinese is assumed; secondary readings may be in a variety of languages.

“Reduce, remove, repair” has recently been proposed as a strategy through which the devastating effects of climate change and colonialism on earth systems, biodiversity, and human societies  might still be reversed. In this course, we will explore a range of representations and practices related to “repair” in China, thinking about how we might repair our understanding of ourselves and of our relation to the world. Our first task will be to unpack basic concepts--repair, environment, nature, world--in relation to one another. We will consider literary, philosophical, and artistic works that question the notion that humans are separate from nature or the environment, and will study the specific means whereby different literary and visual genres call attention to elements--plants, water, air, earth, humans--in need of repair.

Throughout the course, we will ask the following questions: How do we orient ourselves toward repair as a mode of living? What would our daily life look like—how would it change--if it were guided by the aspiration to repair rather than by the desire to progress, expand, extract, and conquer? What can help generate the wish to repair?

Our materials will include ancient Chinese philosophical and literary texts and landscape paintings; Chinese contemporary literary works, artworks, and documentary films; and theoretical texts in environmental humanities.

Finally, our course will also have a practical component, as we will try to learn about “reparative” projects in Chicago and surroundings and undertake at least two field trips to familiarize ourselves with them.