2020-2021

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.  This course will be team-taught by me and historians of the PRC from other institutions, and will be open to selected students from outside the U of C. Non-Chicago students and teachers will participate via video conference. The course is meant for graduate students who are preparing for archival research in China or already working with archival documents. Advanced undergraduates who are doing archival research may enrol with the instructor's permission.

For this course students are required to obtain a “College Reading and Research Course Form” from their College adviser and have it signed both by their faculty reader and by the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Two quarters of this sequence may count as one credit for the EALC major, and are required for any undergraduate writing a B.A. Honors Thesis in EALC. It is highly recommended that students take this sequence autumn and winter, but a spring quarter course is offered for unusual circumstances.

This course will change the way you think about politics. One of the most urgent political questions for any modern society is what economic activity to leave to private actors and what economic activity to place under state control. Today we hear much political debate over whether capitalism or socialism is superior, and what these terms mean. This debate can obscure the historical fact that many different ideological systems around the globe have experimented with highly centralized, state-directed economic organization. In what contexts have these experiments succeeded and failed? What counts as success and failure? To what extent has one experiment in central planning studied and/or learned from examples that preceded it? This course pursues these questions beginning with the origins of modern central planning in Prussia and later during World War I. It goes on to assess other experiments in central planning, including the New Deal, the Soviet Union and Maoist China; the Axis Powers of Italy, the Third Reich, and Imperial Japan; and later in the postcolonial global south from India to Ghana. The class ends by contemplating the Green New Deal and the role of central planning in the future of the United States.

In this course, we will focus primarily on reading (in English) the Laozi and Zhuangzi, paying attention both to philosophical and historical issues. We'll also read several ancillary texts, such as the "Nei ye" chapter of the Guanzi and the "Yu Lao" and Jie Lao" chapter of the Han Feizi, as well as such unearthed manuscripts as the Tai Yi sheng shui and Heng xian. In all cases, we will be concerned first of all with what these texts may have meant to people in the Warring States period, and then only incidentally with how they have been understood in subsequent periods and places.

How can the Buddhist axiom "All Life is Sacred" describe a universe which contains the atrocities of WWII? Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and father of modern Japanese animation, wrestled with this problem over decades in his science fiction epic Phoenix(Hi no Tori), celebrated as the philosophical masterpiece of modern manga. Through a close reading of Phoenix and related texts, this course explores the challenges genocide and other atrocities pose to traditional forms of ethics, and how we understand the human species and our role in nature. The course will also examine the flowering of manga after WWII, how manga authors bypassed censorship to help people understand the war and its causes, and the role manga and anime have played in Japan's global contributions to politics, science, medicine, technology, techno-utopianism, environmentalism, ethics, theories of war and peace, global popular culture, and contemporary Buddhism. Readings will be mainly manga, and the final paper will have a creative option including the possibility of creating graphic work.

This course takes the fictional genre of satire as a unique window on Chinese history. Placing novels and novellas from Republican China, the PRC, and Taiwan alongside excerpts from classic satirical novels from world literature, we will focus not only on the literary merits and themes of these diverse texts but also on their social, political, and historical contexts. What essential elements constitute satire, and how can we understand a historical moment better if we think with this form of literature? What does literature reveal and what does it deliberately or inadvertently obscure? We will consider the ways in which satire advances -- or declines to advance -- or advocate alternative realities (utopias/dystopias), the cultural critique offered by satire and its national and supra-national contexts.

What does it mean to write as a native speaker? How do we hear in our mother tongue? It is often said that people have a natural affinity with their native language, one which allows creators to more freely and wholly express their thoughts and experiences, and which allows audiences to understand the full nuances of a work. But there are also many who do not have a straightforward relationship with a native language. For instance, colonized writers who are forced to write in a language that is not their own, films which depict people in multilingual environments, writers who can speak but not write in their first language. This course surveys literary and artistic works from China, Japan, and Korea that mourn, celebrate, and push the boundaries and potentials of language. Through the analysis of these works, we will explore the ways in which language relates to larger social, political, and cultural contexts including ethnic minorities, diaspora, gender, technology, and more. All works will be provided in English translation.

This course will introduce students to the study of literature in modern East Asia. In particular, it examines the evolution of the novel in Japan, China, and Korea as a form of imaginative writing. We will examine major canonical works from each country: three from the early 20th century; three from mid-century; and three from the early 21st century. How did the novel form develop in East Asia relative to other parts of the world? How has it responded to the shifting geo-political and economic positions of Japan, China, and Korea? How has it attempted to represent social and cultural conflict? Authors to be read include Natsume Soseki, Lu Xun, Xiao Hong, Han Kang, Tawada Yoko, and Cixin Liu. All works will be read in English translation.