2022-2023

Edmund Buckley was one of the first recipients of the Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago. His dissertation was published in 1895 with the title Phallicism in Japan. As a practitioner of the new “science of religions,” Buckley carried out his field work in Japan and collected hundreds of objects to supplement his historical and comparative research with copious examples of contemporary material culture. These talismans, ritual objects, amulets, maps and guides to Buddhist and Shinto pilgrimage sites, portable statues, shrines for traveling and the home, as well as numerous folk curios (such as phalli and kteis related to his research), were kept by the University of Chicago and, over the decades, were moved many times. They now, or much of them at any rate, reside within the Smart Museum of Art. They are uncatalogued, merely stored there, and are largely unknown.

This course will be an examination of the discipline of religionswissenschaft as it was applied to Japan and the religious worlds therein. Buckley’s work, as well as the remnants of his collection, will serve as a major resource. Moreover, close readings of the works of Anesaki Masaharu, Hori Ichiro, Joseph Kitagawa, Helen Hardacre, and others, will enhance our understanding of the history of this discipline as applied to the religious world of Japan.

In terms of their teachings and practices the Ch’an / Son / Zen  (禅) Buddhist traditions in China, Korea, and Japan differed significantly in their respective cultural parameters even as they shared a Sino-centric body of textual materials. The translation of these shared materials into English occurred sporadically from as early as the late 19th century but was first systematically addressed in Kyoto from the 1960s. Ruth Fuller Sasaki created a Zen practice center and a translation atelier at the Ryosen-an (龍泉庵), a cloister within the Daitokuji (大徳寺) Zen Buddhist temple complex, and staffed it with both leading scholars of Buddhism in Japan and a new generation of Zen practitioners and writers from the West. Many of the original materials from these efforts are now held in the Special Collections of the Regenstein Library here at the University of Chicago.

This course will be an examination of how Zen was initially interpreted, translated, and transmitted from the Sino-centric to the Anglophone world in the mid-20th century. The focus will be the actual notes and draft translations of key Zen texts as worked on at the Ryosen-an and its team of Japan-based scholars and practitioners. Supplemental readings will contextualize these efforts more generally with the history of Zen in the West.

This course will focus on Confucius, both the historical man and the legendary figure, and on the Analects, which purports to record his teachings. Through readings of the Analects in translation and of secondary scholarship in English, we will seek to determine to what extent it is possible to understand the relationship between the man and the book. For students with a basic knowledge of classical Chinese, extra sessions will be arranged to read the Analects in Chinese.

From premodern to modern societies, human beings have been producing material objects that support or enrich their lives in particular social and cultural expressions. In this course, we will investigate the history of craft production and discuss the materials, methods, contexts, and meanings of skilled craft in East Asia. The making of material objects can take numerous forms, and usually involve multiple social groups who rely on different methods of knowing (e.g., tacit or explicit, individually embodied or widely shared). From the imperial and official workshop of early China to the silk weaving household in post-Meiji Japan, and from the handicraft communities in rural China of the twentieth century to the contemporary Korean Hanji paper artist – we will study a diverse range of crafts and consider various ways of making and knowing in relation to creativity and innovation, labor organizations, social structures, as well as statecraft and political power. By engaging with scholarships in history, anthropology, archaeology, art history, material culture, and history of science and technology, we will ask: How are the processes of object-, self-, and world-making intertwined? What is the relationship between making and knowing? How have these different approaches in making and/or knowing evolved alongside broader changes in the history of East Asia? What can they tell us about people’s lives and experiences in a given culture and society?

For the final project, students will have the creative option to remake a historical artifact of East Asia and reflect upon their hands-on experience in this process. All readings will be provided in English.

In this class we will read and analyze the key texts (in English translation) of the two great classical "sinifying" Chinese Buddhist theoretical schools of the Sui, Tang and Song dynasties: Tiantai and Huayan, with special attention to what is arguably their biggest shared innovation: the development of the classical Mahāyāna Buddhist idea of Emptiness (sūnyata) into the "omnicentric" idea that each entity, precisely through its emptiness, is in some sense present in all times and places, is eternal and omnipresent--and the controversies arising from the different justifications and implications advanced by the two schools for this shared doctrine. Readings will include the works of Zhiyi, Zhanran and Zhili from the Tiantai school, and Dushun, Zhiyan, Chengguan and Zongmi. Some basic background in Buddhist thought is recommended. Readings will be in English, but an optional reading group working with the original texts in classical texts will likely also be convened.

The goal of this course is to introduce you to the central themes and texts of classical Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions, both as philosophical works to be evaluated and digested for their doctrinal content and as literary artifacts from a perhaps unfamiliar cultural sphere. This will call for the development of two distinct but related sets of skills, namely, the ability to think through and comprehend philosophical arguments and ideas, and the equally crucial ability to reflect on one's own assumptions as they come into play in one's reaction to and evaluation of those ideas. Readings will include, from the classical period, the Four Books (Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, Analects of Confucius, Mencius), Xunzi, the Book of Changes, and from Sung-Ming Neo-Confucian writings of Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, the Cheng Brothers, Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming.

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.