EALC

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.

In this course we will read premodern Japanese literature and performance alongside modern works of page, stage, and film by Higuchi Ichiyo, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Enchi Fumiko, Mishima Yukio, Oba Minako, and others, which engage with these classical texts either thematically or formally. We will pay special attention to internal and external dynamics of recollection, evocation, alienation and inheritance, to shifting perceptions of orality in literature, and to explorations of alternative realities and possibilities in the remembrance (and misremembrance) of classical literature and performance.  Readings will be available in English, but those with knowledge of modern Japanese will be strongly encouraged to read in Japanese where possible. Prior knowledge of Classical Japanese is not required. Advanced undergraduates interested in joining must receive prior approval by emailing instructor.

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.

The ideal of the amateur author has repeatedly been invoked in different moments and for different purposes throughout the history of modern China. Non-professional writers have often been considered more “authentic”— their perceptions less hindered by conventions and more sensitive to the details of everyday life. In the socialist world, amateur writing and art was one of the strategies to contrast the division between mental and manual labor. And today, we assist to a veritable explosion made possible by digital media which fully reveals the inherent contradictions of amateur creativity. Seen by many as a means to escape oppressive labor regimes, it ends up being the most commodified form of labor of our times.  This class will proceed through a series of case studies to understand the valorization of amateurism in modern Chinese culture in historical and comparative perspective. Special attention will be paid to the media environments that make it possible, and to the ways amateur writing and art depict labor. Our overall goal, in sum, will be to familiarize ourselves with some of the ways in which the relation between creativity, amateurism, and labor has been represented and theorized.

“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.

This course engages with the various techniques and practices associated with sound in Japanese culture, ranging from the 18th century through the contemporary era. The media covered will include literature, language reform movements, theater, cinema (both silent and sound), recorded music, radio broadcasting, manga, video games and anime. We will also read recent sound-oriented approaches to literary and cultural studies from scholars from both Japan and elsewhere. All readings will be in English.

An introduction to the reading and study of manuscripts and epigraphy, mainly from the Tang and Song eras.

The history of Maoist China is usually told as a sequence of political campaigns: land and marriage reform, nationalization of industry, anti-rightist campaign, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, etc. Yet for the majority of the Chinese population, the promise of socialism was as much about material improvements as it was about political change: a socialist revolution would bring about “two-storey brick houses, electric lights and telephones” (loushang louxia, diandeng dianhua), new work regimes and new consumption patterns. If we want to understand what socialism meant for different groups of people, we have to look at the "new objects" of  socialist modernity, at changes in dress codes and apartment layouts, at electrification and city planning – or at the absence of such changes and the persistence of older patterns of material life under a new, socialist veneer. At the methodological level, we ask how Material Culture and Everyday Life approaches help us understand the lives of people who wrote little and were rarely written about. How do we read people's life experiences out of the material record of their lives?

Worldwide, women do about 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly. Women’s underpaid work at home and in industry subsidized the early stages of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain, early twentieth-century Japan, and contemporary China, and women’s unpaid contributions to their households enable employers worldwide to keep wages low. We know, at least in outline, how women came to carry double burdens in Europe and North America, but little research has been done so far about this process in East Asia. In this course, we will discuss when and how China, Japan, and Korea developed a division of labor in which most wage work was gendered male and reproductive work was marked female. Are current divisions of labor between men and women rooted in local cultures, or are they the result of industrial capitalist development? How do divisions of labor differ between the three East Asian countries, and how did developments in one East Asian country affect others?