2014-2015

This course will explore the cultural and cultural history of Edo/Tokyo from its origins in the early seventeenth century through c. 1945. Issues to be explored include the configuration of urban space and its transformation over time in relation to issues of status, class, and political authority, the formation of the "city person" as a form of identity, and the tensions between the real city of lived experience and the imagined city of art and literature. We will pay particular attention to two periods of transformation, the 1870s when the modernizing state made Tokyo its capital, and the period of reconstruction after the devastating earthquake of 1923. Assignments include a final research paper of approximately 15-18 pages.

This class provides an overview of major developments in Chinese social history from the high Qing period (roughly the eighteenth century) until very recent times. It focuses on the lives of “ordinary people,” especially in the countryside, where over 80 percent of China’s population lived until roughly 1980, and over 40 percent still live today. Topics include family organization, relations between the generations, and gender roles; property rights, class relations, and their implications for economic activity; the nature of village communities and their relationship to political/legal authority; migration, frontier settlement, and changes in ethnic and national identity; twentieth-century urbanization, consumerism, and changing notions of the individual; and collective protest, violence, and revolution. A secondary theme is more theoretical: what is it possible to know about the lives of people who left few records of their own, and how do we evaluate what are often, inevitably, thinly documented claims? The class format will include a lot of lecture, but mixed with both in-class and online discussion. No background knowledge is required.

This course will survey the uses to which writing was put in China during the period 1200-200 B.C., and then, more briefly, in Japan during the period A.D. 600-900.  We will be concerned both with the mechanics of writing itself and with its role in society. The survey will be broken into four discrete topics: the invention of writing in China, the nature of the Chinese script, the uses to which writing was put during its first thousand years in China, and early writing in Korea and Japan. All reading will be in English, though some knowledge of an East Asian language will be useful.

This course will help students to understand the present-day situations of a wide array of religions that exist in the mainland Chinese society, including popular religion, Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism, New Religious Movements, and Islam. We will discuss their institutional practices, positions in the society, relations with the state and the economy. The course will also examine how the present-day conditions came into being, by tracing to the traditional model of late imperial China (1368－1911), and investigating how changes occurred in Republican China (1911－1949), why the Maoist period (1949－1976) was the turning point, and how a new religious situation with characteristics distinct from the traditional model has been emerging in post-Mao China. We will make reference to the religious situations in Taiwan to illustrate the distinctiveness of the case of mainland China.

This course covers the history of Chinese theater from its emergence as a full-fledged art  form in the 10th-11th centuries (the Northern Song) up through its incorporation into modern urban life and nationalist discourse in the first decades of the 20th century (the Republican period). In addition to reading selections from masterpieces of Chinese dramatic literature such as Orphan of Zhao, Romance of the Western Chamber, The Peony Pavilion, we will pay particular attention to the different types of venues, occasions, and performance practices associated with different genres of opera at different moments in time. A central theme will be the changing status of the entertainer and the cultural meanings assigned to acting.  All texts to be read in English translation.

This readings and research sequence provides graduate and advanced undergraduate students an opportunity to study the evolving interaction between the social and state institutions of the family and the law. How did this interaction change throughout China's readings of primary and secondary texts drawn from the Qing through the PRC periods will show the effect of structural legal change at the local level of the family. We will read both in translation and in Chinese; but students should expect that the bulk of their primary source research for their final papers due in winter quarter should extend beyond the sources sampled on the autumn syllabus. We will also engage with ongoing debates about the extent of civil law in imperial China. To what extent are legal practices in the Republican era and PRC a legacy of Qing law or Qing custom? How does Chinese society's definition of a crime change over time, and what role does the law play in shaping social attitudes toward different behavior? The class will also include opportunities to reflect upon the overall evolution of China's legal system throughout this dynamic period.

Reading and research in Japanese history, which culminates in a major seminar paper at the end of winter term.

Since the early 1990s, a vibrant field of scholarship has emerged around the histories, politics, and artistic representations of same-sex love in Chinese-language cultures. While responding to the new visibility of diverse expressions of sexual and gender identity in the Sinophone world, these scholarly endeavors also represent an attempt to bring the field of queer studies to bear on area studies. This course aims at familiarizing ourselves with this scholarship, tracing its terminological tensions and shifts and surveying the diverse genealogies and archives that it proposes. An equally important goal will be to read closely some of the key Chinese literary texts, films, and documents that deal with same-sex love, asking whether and how they exceed heteronormative configurations and promote alternative visions of intimacy and community.

This course investigates traditional literary strategies in China through which objects are depicted and animated. Our emphasis will be on reading in primary sources, but we’ll also draw on secondary sources from anthropology, the history of material culture, literary theory, and art history, both from within and outside China studies.  Each week will introduce some basic genre and key literary works while also foregrounding certain conceptual issues. Students will  select a case study to work on throughut the quarter, which will become their final research paper and which will also help orient their shorter class presentations. The choice of subject for the case study is quite open, so that each student can pursue a project that relates to his or her own central interests. It might be a cultural biography of a real object or class of objects; it might be a study of how objects are deployed in a novel or play, encyclopedia or connoisseurship manual, but there are many other possibilities.

During the first quarter, students begin defining and researching their seminar paper topic and become acquainted with the secondary literature and primary sources of the area of their research. During the winter quarter, students write a paper on defined topic, based on the secondary literature and primary sources studied during the autumn. The seminar meets every week to discuss the progress of each student’s paper.