2023-2024

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. 

What does "censorship" mean? Specifically, how does the censorship of literature work in contemporary China, and what are its goals? How does censorship relate to the selective remembering of history, to processes of linguistic unification, to questions of morality and politics, and to the respect for minorities and subaltern groups? Guided by these broad questions and combining theoretical readings and case studies, this class aims to develop a nuanced approach to literary censorship that takes into account the constraints and limitations that always attend to the creation and circulation of literary works--in China as elsewhere.

This is intended to be a reading course in the Shang shu 尚書 or Venerated Documents, also known as the Shu jing 書經or Classic of Documents, traditionally considered to be the second of the Chinese classics (no matter how many classics are included). The contents run the gamut from royal proclamations to ministerial advice, and purport to date from the time of Yao 堯 through the early Eastern Zhou period. For more than two millennia, the text has been the focus of China’s most celebrated textual scholarship, both because of the interest of its content and also because of its inclusion of two different types of documents: what are termed “New Text” chapters and “Old Text” chapters. We will consider both the received text and also recently discovered manuscript versions of several chapters.

This course asks a basic question: Of what does China's built environment in history consist? Unlike other genres of art in China, a history of China's built environment still waits to be written, concerning both the physical structure and spatial sensibility shaped by it. To this end, students will be introduced to a variety of materials related to our topic, ranging from urban planning, buildings, tombs, gardens, and furniture. The course aims to explore each of the built environments-its principles, tradition, and history-based on existing examples and textual sources, and to propose ways and concepts in which the materials discussed throughout the quarter can be analyzed and understood as a broader historical narrative of China's built environment. This course is part of the College Course Cluster, Urban Design.

The aim of this course is to introduce a history of contemporary art from China since the 1970s. The course begins with a brief overview of modern art activities in China during the early 20th century along with art production amidst the Cultural Revolution era (1966-1976), under Mao. The course will then focus on contemporary avant-garde movements during the 1970s and 1980s, the response to urbanization in art at the onset of the new millennium, the influence of globalization since 2000, and a new generation of young artists from China as well as Chinese diasporic artists working transnationally. Critical attention will be paid to ways in which artists respond to the obsolescence of physical environments and interactions due to major investments in robotics, AI technologies, online communication platforms, and virtual monetary exchange applications. In addition to working with important secondary texts focused on contemporary art from China, students will have the unique opportunity to examine primary documents that I have obtained during my ongoing research activities in China. These include video footage, photo documentation, archival materials, and real artworks. We will also access Gao Minglu's extensive archives of contemporary Chinese art documents.

The socialist period (for our purposes here, c. 1949-1980) fundamentally transformed the institutions of Chinese social and economic life. Marriage and family were redefined; rural communities were reorganized on a collective basis; private property in land and other means of production was abolished. Industrialization created a new urban working class, whose access to welfare, consumer goods, and political rights depended to a large extent on their membership in work units (danwei). Migration between city and countryside almost came to a halt, and rural and urban society developed in different directions. This course will focus on the concrete details of how this society functioned. How did state planning work? What was it like to work in a socialist factory? What role did money and consumption play in a planned economy? Our readings are in English, but speakers of Chinese are encouraged to use Chinese materials (first-hand sources, if they can be found) for their final papers. All readings will be posted on Canvas.  

This course will consist of the close reading and discussion of primary texts (in translation) of the Chan and Zen Buddhism of China and Japan, with a few secondary descriptions of Zen institutions and cultural influences. This will be done both with an eye to the historical development of these schools of thought and practice within the context of East Asian Buddhism in general, and for whatever transhistorical valences we care to derive from the texts.

This course is an introduction to the arts of China focusing on the bronze vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, the Chinese appropriation of the Buddha image, and the evolution of landscape and figure painting traditions. This course considers objects in contexts (from the archaeological sites from which they were unearthed to the material culture that surrounded them) to reconstruct the functions and the meanings of objects, and to better understand Chinese culture through the objects it produced.

In this course, our main purpose will be to read a representative sample of the poems (about one-fifth, some sixty different poems) in the Shi jing 詩經 or Classic of Poetry, China’s earliest collection of poetry.  In addition to reading these poems, we will also discuss related secondary scholarship written in English (students are also most welcome to read secondary scholarship in Chinese).