EALC

This course explores the predominant significance of materials, rather than image or style, in conveying the intended meaning of works of art and in manifesting artists’ aesthetic judgement or social critique. These materials can be natural or artificial, personal or generic. They are “selected” either collectively or individually to become the major means of making art over a significant period in history or an artist's career. What are the sources of power of such materials? How are they transformed into works of art? What are their connections with technology, environment, economy, society, religion, culture, and personal experience? Students are expected to conduct individual studies on selected cases (from any time in Chinese history) and to actively respond to other presentations.

This course defines “Chinese state” as a state that uses Chinese Script to define its legal institutions. A rich variety of this kind of state can be observed in the history of East Asia, showing a wide range of different ethnic, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. The objective of this course is to highlight the fundamental breaks in the history of these Chinese states, which often hide under a thick curtain of linguistic continuity. Though contemporary Chinese states are undoubtedly rooted in history, this course avoids diminishing the history of the former Chinese states to a pre-history of any contemporary Chinese state. This course is divided into part I (Autumn term) and part II (Winter term). Part I concentrates on the first Chinese states, covering a period when written history in East Asia was still limited to Chinese history. Interstate relations were thus limited to international relations between Chinese states or to Chinese state relations with states without indigenous script systems. This period commences in the early Bronze Age and reaches the seventh century CE. The course will show that the legacy of script, language and concepts did not limit the plurality of legal institutions, which may be considered a natural result of differing socio-economic needs. Part II starts from the eighth century. At that time, the state of Tang became the first Chinese state for which we have evidence that it concluded equal international treaties with non-Chinese states.

This course defines “Chinese state” as a state that uses Chinese Script to define its legal institutions. A rich variety of this kind of state can be observed in the history of East Asia, showing a wide range of different ethnic, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. The objective of this course is to highlight the fundamental breaks in the history of these Chinese states, which often hide under a thick curtain of linguistic continuity. Though contemporary Chinese states are undoubtedly rooted in history, this course avoids diminishing the history of the former Chinese states to a pre-history of any contemporary Chinese state. This course is divided into part I (Autumn term) and part II (Winter term). Part I concentrates on the first Chinese states, covering a period when written history in East Asia was still limited to Chinese history. Interstate relations were thus limited to international relations between Chinese states or to Chinese state relations with states without indigenous script systems. This period commences in the early Bronze Age and reaches the seventh century CE. The course will show that the legacy of script, language and concepts did not limit the plurality of legal institutions, which may be considered a natural result of differing socio-economic needs. Part II starts from the eighth century. At that time, the state of Tang became the first Chinese state for which we have evidence that it concluded equal international treaties with non-Chinese states.

The great Chinese-Manchu novel “Honglou meng” (ca. 1750) has been assigned one major author, Cao Xueqin, whose life has been the subject of much investigation. But before 1922 little was known about Cao, and interpreters of the novel were forced to make headway solely on the basis of textual clues. The so-called “Three Commentators” edition (“Sanjia ping Shitou ji”) shows these readers at their creative, polemical, and far-fetched best. We will be reading the first 80 chapters of the novel and discussing its reception in the first 130 years of its published existence (1792-1922), with special attention to hermeneutical strategies and claims of authorial purpose. Familiarity with classical Chinese required.

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of queer literature from East Asia in English translation. This course will focus on such contemporary fiction, exploring how “queer” interfaces with issues of identity and subjecthood; desire, embodiment and reproduction; creativity and labor, and more. To this end, beyond issues of fictional representation, we will work to parse the relation between queer as an identity or subject position (queer people/characters) and queer as a set of interpretive strategies and ethical orientations to cultural texts (queer critique).  In the first half of the quarter, we will examine some of this recent fiction alongside queer literary criticism and theory, and hold in-class workshops to conceptualize together the “queer” in queer literature and learn about the current situation of queer activism and cultural production in East Asia. In the second half of the quarter, we will read further East Asian literature through several thematic clusters – family, fandom, desire, etc. – while applying the interpretive approaches we learned in the first. The course may include readings by authors such as Wang Xiaobo, Park Sang Young, Murata Sayaka, Li Kotomi and Chi Ta-Wei among others. No prior knowledge is required; all readings will be in English. 

The third quarter of the East Asian civilization sequence covers the emerging nation-states of China, Korea, and Japan in the context of Western and Japanese imperialism and the rise of an interconnected global economy. Our themes include industrialization and urbanization, state strengthening and nation-building, the rise of social movements and mass politics, the impact of Japanese colonialism on the homeland and the colonies, East Asia in the context of US-Soviet rivalry, and the return of the region to the center of the global economy in the postwar years. Similar to the first and second quarters, we will look at East Asia as an integrated region, connected by trade and cultural exchange even when divided into opposing blocs during the Cold War. As much as possible, we will look beyond nation-states and their policies at underlying trends shared by the three East Asian nations, such as demographic change, changes in gender roles, and the rise of consumer culture.

According to Bruno Latour, “technology is society made durable.” In Francesca Bray’s words, “technologies are specific to a society, embodiments of its visions of the world and of its struggles over social order. [T]he most important work that technologies do is to produce people: the makers are shaped by the making, and the users shaped by the using.” This course looks at technologies in China since late imperial times and asks how technology both expressed and shaped visions of what Chinese society should be. We start with technologies of the body (how to sit on a kang, how to have healthy babies, how to become a deity, how to do a forensic investigation of a dead body), then move on to agricultural technologies and nutrition, to manufacturing (in sites ranging from the imperial palace to small paper workshops), and to communication technologies such as printing. Next, we look at Chinese worldviews and systems of classification and how they changed, partly due to growing exposure to views from Europe, Japan, and the Islamic world. In the last few weeks, we will look at the vernacular technologies of the Republican era, at Mao-era mass science and mass technology, and some of the contemporary uses of modern communication technology in China. All readings in English.

Past scholarship has often reduced the history of Chinese labor to the history of the Chinese labor movement or the history of the Communist Party in its function as “the leading core” of the proletariat. The factory proletariat, of course, was never more than a small segment of the Chinese labor force – less than five percent under the Republic, less than ten in the People’s Republic. Recent work has been more inclusive, looking at work outside the formal sector, in agriculture, handcrafts, and service industries; at the work of women in formal employment and at home; at sex work and emotional work; at unemployment and precarious work; at the work of internal migrants; at Chinese workers abroad; at coerced work in private industry (the 2007 “kiln slaves’ incident”); and at carceral labor in Xinjiang and elsewhere. Most of the readings will deal with work in the Mao and post-Mao years, right up to the present. We will combine readings on Chinese labor history with more general texts on the relationship between productive and reproductive work, wage work and non-wage work, male and female work, autonomous and heteronomous work. The guiding question throughout the course is if a new Chinese labor movement is necessary, possible, or probable, and if it is not, under which conditions it might become so.

This course is an exploration of concepts of the wonderous and marvelous in Japanese literature and performance up to 1900. Primary texts and materials will include setsuwa collections, such as the Nihon ryoiki and Konjaku monogatari, poetry and poetics, late Heian monogatari, early modern travel fiction, theater, and encyclopedias.We will also consider theater's engagement with the spacial and embodied aspects of wonder through noh performance and theory, spectacle shows and circuses, exhibitions and worlds fairs, the operating theater and the human body. Alongside these primary texts and performances, we will survey recent scholarship on the history of wonder and marvel, considering along the way theories of fictionality, theatricality, affect and the senses, "objective agency" and the stage prop, and intersections between science, medicine, and the ludic.

Readings will be available in English and no prior coursework in Japanese literature or history is required.

The course explores a central aspect of Chinese contemporary culture, namely the process of transposing new and old stories from the page to the stage to the screen. In addition, the class seeks to expand the concept of adaptation to investigate how cinema appropriates and repurposes other media, and why specific intermedial genres emerge more prominently at certain historical conjunctures. The films we will watch encompass three genres: comedy, opera film, and documentary, each respectively characterized by thematic and formal engagements with television, regional theater, and screen-based news. Some of the screenings will be followed by discussions with filmmakers, in person or on Zoom.