2021-2022

Games are everywhere, so pervasive that we tend to take for granted what games are and how the notion of play is associated with specific cultural and historical contexts. In this class, we will defamiliarize our understandings of games and play by exploring their active interactions with literature mainly in pre-modern China and Japan. From Tang dynasty riddle tales to Edo period puppet theater, from the fantastic pilgrimage in the novel Journey to the West to the virtual journey on the Sugoroku game board—all these materials we will cover in class center on the ways in which playing, storytelling, and reading go hand in hand with one another. Stories are turned into literary games, and sometimes, games start to tell stories. By engaging theories in game studies, media studies, and narratology with a close reading and discussion of selected tales, novels, and plays, we will consider: What aspects of games and play, as well as their related cultural values can we discover in these literary works? How do games and play as a perspective enable us to consider such issues as fictional world, objecthood, adaptation, and memory in literature and beyond? How do certain narrative and stylistic devices in different media (e.g. textual, visual, and material) function in our examination of games and stories? All readings will be provided in English.

This course introduces students to modern Japanese literature through the form of the novel. We begin in the late-nineteenth century, when a new generation of writers sought to come to terms with this world historical form, and end in the twenty-first, with writers trying to sustain the form through graphic art and digital media. Along the way, we will consider some of the key debates that have structured the novel's evolution: between elite and mass forms, truth and fiction, art and politics, self and other, native and foreign. The course also looks at how the form has evolved in response to shifting modes of cultural production and shifting patterns of literary consumption. Authors covered may include Natsume Soseki, Yokomitsu Ri'ichi, Hayashi Fumiko, Oe Kenzaburo, Takahashi Takako, and Tawada Yoko. All works will be read in English.

In this class, we will discuss the role that comparison plays as a key method for studying East Asian cultures. We will explore ways of making comparison and reflect on our own habits of comparative thinking. What is comparable and what is not? How can comparison reveal otherwise hidden connections? How might comparison inflict violence on the subjects that we study? How can we compare responsibly, sensitively, and creatively? We will focus on three themes: race, media, and language. We will explore how their interconnections present new opportunities and challenges for comparative thinking when studying Japan, Korea, and China from a global perspective. In lieu of a final paper, each student will develop a critical reflection journal responding to these questions by examining selected cases in a medium of choice (such as handwritten pages, podcast, short film, blog, poetry). All classes will be divided into seminar sessions and workshop sessions. In a seminar session, we will discuss a selection of literary materials, films, and recent theoretical texts produced in interdisciplinary fields including cultural studies, media studies, and postcolonial studies in East Asian contexts in the premodern and modern eras. In a workshop session, we will discuss new portions of students’ journal-in-progress (which will be circulated beforehand). The goal is to help each student develop and modify their own approach to drawing insightful comparison. This class welcomes EALC majors and minors, MAPH students, and other students who are interested in this topic. 

In this class, we will explore a variety of environments and ecological systems portrayed in Chinese short stories in the 20th and 21st centuries, ranging from forests to media ecology. What do fictional tales tell us about the relationship between human beings and nature and the interaction between people inhabiting different types of environment (e.g. the urban versus the rural)? How is ecocriticism entangled with literary criticism? How can we gain a new perspective on the genre of short fiction by considering techniques for storytelling in ecological terms? We will read stories written by famous Chinese writers including Lu Xun, Yu Hua, and Mo Yan (the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012) in conjunction with a selection of theoretical texts. This class welcomes EALC majors and minors, MAPH students, and other students who are interested in this topic. No prior knowledge of Chinese is needed.

Dunhuang, a key oasis town on the cultural and economic networks of ancient Eurasia known today as the “Silk Roads,” lay for centuries at the nexus of four major cultural spheres: those of China, Tibet, Central Asia, and the Steppe. Dunhuang is renowned especially for its connection with the Mogao Caves, a major Buddhist temple and pilgrimage site. Its immense importance today lies in the fact that it is not only the most important collection of Buddhist painting in the ancient world, but that it also held a cache of manuscripts and block-printed texts that has transformed our understanding of the history of the region, and especially of the histories of Buddhism, Daoism, Manichaeism, and Christianity. Dunhuang’s location at the nexus of cultural spheres is reflected in the astonishing range of languages attested at the site, in manuscripts, epigraphy, and graffiti. These include Chinese, Tibetan, Khotanese, Sogdian, Old Uyghur, Old Türkic, Sanskrit, Tangut, and Kuchean, among others. This course is an exploration of the rich history of Dunhuang and the Mogao Caves: not only the ancient histories reflected in its art, objects, and texts, but also the modern histories of those materials, which are today in good part scattered across the globe in museum and library collections filled by agents of 20th Century empires.

Open to both undergraduates and graduates. This course is designed to improve Japanese reading, speaking, writing and listening ability to the advanced high level as measured by the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Proficiency Guidelines. Weekly assignments will require students to tackle modern Japanese texts of varying length and difficulty. Organized around a range of thought-provoking themes (from brain death and organ transplants to Japanese values on work and religion), reading assignments will include academic theses in psychology and anthropology, literary texts, and popular journalism. After completing the readings, students will be encouraged to discuss each topic in class. Videos/DVDs will be used to improve listening comprehension skills. There will also be writing assignments.

Open to both undergraduates and graduates. This course is designed to improve Japanese reading, speaking, writing and listening ability to the advanced high level as measured by the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Proficiency Guidelines. Weekly assignments will require students to tackle modern Japanese texts of varying length and difficulty. Organized around a range of thought-provoking themes (from brain death and organ transplants to Japanese values on work and religion), reading assignments will include academic theses in psychology and anthropology, literary texts, and popular journalism. After completing the readings, students will be encouraged to discuss each topic in class. Videos/DVDs will be used to improve listening comprehension skills. There will also be writing assignments.

This course is intended to improve Japanese reading, speaking, writing, and listening ability to the advanced low level as measured by the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Proficiency Guidelines. Weekly assignments require students to tackle modern Japanese texts of varying length and difficulty. Organized around a range of thought-provoking themes, reading assignments include academic theses, literary texts, and popular journalism. After each reading, students are encouraged to discuss the topic in class and are required to write their own thoughts on each reading along with a summary. The class meets for two eighty-minute sessions each week. All courses in this sequence must be taken for a quality grade.

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. The target group for the course are graduate students and advanced undergraduates with good Chinese reading skills.

The late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the intensification of nationalist and anti-colonial movements in Asia. What understandings of imperialism did these different movements develop? How and why did those movements take such divergent paths in their anti-colonial struggles? And despite these divergences, what similar political, social, and economic trends animated them? This class will explore the connections and disparities between emergent nationalisms in India, China, and Japan. Instead of accepting distinctions between East and South Asia or between colonialism and semi-colonialism as proof of incomparability, this class will use the differences between these three countries to develop a comprehensive understanding of the various ways that societies responded to the threat of foreign rule and encroachment. By reading a combination of primary and secondary sources, students will discover the indelible influence that resistance to imperialism had on the development of nationalist thought in these three societies, even as that resistance took on increasingly different forms as time passed. Beginning with efforts in the late-nineteenth century to categorize their position in a global hierarchy vis-à-vis the Western powers, this course then tracks the ways that Japanese, Indian, and Chinese nationalisms took on similar shapes in different contexts before rapidly diverging in the early twentieth century.