EALC

After a brief introduction to Shang oracle-bone inscriptions, we will focus on Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. The choice of inscriptions to study will depend on the interests of the students in class.

This hands-on reading and research course aims to give graduate students the linguistic skills needed to locate, read, and analyze archival documents from the People's Republic of China. We will begin by discussing the functions and structure of Chinese archives at the central, provincial, and county level. Next we will read and translate sample documents drawn from different archives. These may include police reports, personnel files, internal memos, minutes of meetings, etc. Our aim here is to understand the conventions of a highly standardized communication system - for example, how does a report or petition from an inferior to a superior office differ from a top-down directive or circular, or from a lateral communication between adminstrations of equal rank? We will also read "sub-archival" documents, i.e. texts that are of interest to the historian but did not make it into state archives, such as letters, diaries, contracts, and private notebooks. The texts we will read are selected to cast light on the everyday life of "ordinary" people in the Maoist period.  This course will be team-taught by me and historians of the PRC from other institutions, and will be open to selected students from outside the U of C. Non-Chicago students and teachers will participate via video conference. The course is meant for graduate students who are preparing for archival research in China or already working with archival documents. Advanced undergraduates who are doing archival research may enrol with the instructor's permission.

For this course students are required to obtain a “College Reading and Research Course Form” from their College adviser and have it signed both by their faculty reader and by the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Two quarters of this sequence may count as one credit for the EALC major, and are required for any undergraduate writing a B.A. Honors Thesis in EALC. It is highly recommended that students take this sequence autumn and winter, but a spring quarter course is offered for unusual circumstances.

This course will change the way you think about politics. One of the most urgent political questions for any modern society is what economic activity to leave to private actors and what economic activity to place under state control. Today we hear much political debate over whether capitalism or socialism is superior, and what these terms mean. This debate can obscure the historical fact that many different ideological systems around the globe have experimented with highly centralized, state-directed economic organization. In what contexts have these experiments succeeded and failed? What counts as success and failure? To what extent has one experiment in central planning studied and/or learned from examples that preceded it? This course pursues these questions beginning with the origins of modern central planning in Prussia and later during World War I. It goes on to assess other experiments in central planning, including the New Deal, the Soviet Union and Maoist China; the Axis Powers of Italy, the Third Reich, and Imperial Japan; and later in the postcolonial global south from India to Ghana. The class ends by contemplating the Green New Deal and the role of central planning in the future of the United States.

This course offers an introduction to Japanese animation, from its origins in the 1910s to its emergence as global culture in the 1990s. The goal is not only to provide insight into Japanese animation within the context of Japan but also to consider those factors that have transformed it into a global cultural form with a diverse, worldwide fanbase. As such, the course approaches Japanese animation from three distinct perspectives on Japanese animation, which are designed to introduce students to three important methodological approaches to contemporary media — film studies, media studies, and fan studies or cultural studies. As we look at Japanese animation in light of these different conceptual frameworks, we will also consider how its transnational dissemination and ‘Asianization’ challenge some of our basic assumptions about global culture, which have been shaped primarily through the lens of Americanization.

In this course, we will focus primarily on reading (in English) the Laozi and Zhuangzi, paying attention both to philosophical and historical issues. We'll also read several ancillary texts, such as the "Nei ye" chapter of the Guanzi and the "Yu Lao" and Jie Lao" chapter of the Han Feizi, as well as such unearthed manuscripts as the Tai Yi sheng shui and Heng xian. In all cases, we will be concerned first of all with what these texts may have meant to people in the Warring States period, and then only incidentally with how they have been understood in subsequent periods and places.

How can the Buddhist axiom "All Life is Sacred" describe a universe which contains the atrocities of WWII? Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and father of modern Japanese animation, wrestled with this problem over decades in his science fiction epic Phoenix(Hi no Tori), celebrated as the philosophical masterpiece of modern manga. Through a close reading of Phoenix and related texts, this course explores the challenges genocide and other atrocities pose to traditional forms of ethics, and how we understand the human species and our role in nature. The course will also examine the flowering of manga after WWII, how manga authors bypassed censorship to help people understand the war and its causes, and the role manga and anime have played in Japan's global contributions to politics, science, medicine, technology, techno-utopianism, environmentalism, ethics, theories of war and peace, global popular culture, and contemporary Buddhism. Readings will be mainly manga, and the final paper will have a creative option including the possibility of creating graphic work.

This course takes the fictional genre of satire as a unique window on Chinese history. Placing novels and novellas from Republican China, the PRC, and Taiwan alongside excerpts from classic satirical novels from world literature, we will focus not only on the literary merits and themes of these diverse texts but also on their social, political, and historical contexts. What essential elements constitute satire, and how can we understand a historical moment better if we think with this form of literature? What does literature reveal and what does it deliberately or inadvertently obscure? We will consider the ways in which satire advances -- or declines to advance -- or advocate alternative realities (utopias/dystopias), the cultural critique offered by satire and its national and supra-national contexts.

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, socialism was as much about material changes as about politics: about the two-storey brick houses, electric lights and telephones (loushang louxia, diandeng dianhua) that the revolution had promised; about new work regimes and new consumption patterns – or, to the contrary, about the absence of such change. 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 dresscodes and apartment layouts, at electrification and city planning. We have to analyze workplaces and labor processes in order to understand how socialism changed the way people worked. We also have to look at the rationing of consumer goods and its effects on people's daily lives. The course has a strong comparative dimension: we will look at the literature on socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, to see how Chinese socialism differed from its cousins. Another aim is methodological. How can we understand the lives of people who wrote little and were rarely written about? To which extent can we read people's life experiences out of material objects? 

This course is about ways some fundamental questions about life have been asked and answered in Chinese traditions. What is the world—especially what we today might call the “natural” or “living” world? How should one live, and see one’s life, within it? What is our relationship with it? How can we best understand it? How should our understanding guide our own lives and practices? We’ll explore some traditional Chinese responses to these questions as they have been expressed in religious practice, painting, literature, philosophy, gardening, and travel. Programmatically, the course is a hybrid: a “great works” course in the classic mold grafted onto a survey of some recent writings in the “environmental humanities.” These texts will both provide a set of conversation partners for our classic Chinese works and outline possible resources for reading and thinking about them here in our present age of ecological catastrophe generated, in large part, by our modern human practices.