Autumn

The great Chinese-Manchu novel “Honglou meng” (ca. 1750) has been assigned one major author, Cao Xueqin, whose life has been the subject of much investigation. But before 1922 little was known about Cao, and interpreters of the novel were forced to make headway solely on the basis of textual clues. The so-called “Three Commentators” edition (“Sanjia ping Shitou ji”) shows these readers at their creative, polemical, and far-fetched best. We will be reading the first 80 chapters of the novel and discussing its reception in the first 130 years of its published existence (1792-1922), with special attention to hermeneutical strategies and claims of authorial purpose. Familiarity with classical Chinese required.

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.

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.

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 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.

An examination of interpretations of Japan, Japanese thought, religion, culture, art, society from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries with a particular focus on critical readings of Orientalism, Buddhist historiography, modernization theories, and indigeneity.

Introductory studies of Chinese history and culture often ignore religion, treating Confucius's alleged agnosticism as representative of mainstream culture. But ideas about supernatural entities—souls separated from bodies, ancestral spirits, demons, immortals, the vital energies of mountains and rivers, etc.—and practices aimed at managing those spirits were important elements in pre-1949 life. Spirits testified in court cases, cured or caused illnesses, mediated disputes, changed the weather, and made the realm governable or ungovernable. After declining (1950–’70s), at least in public, various kinds of worship are again immensely popular, though usually in altered forms. This course traces changes in the intersection of ideas about spirits and daily social practices, focusing on attempts to "standardize the gods," resistance to such efforts, and the consequences for cohesion, or lack of cohesion, across classes, genders, territory, ethnicity, and other differences. The ways in which religion has been intertwined with attempts to define communities and claim rights within (or over) them will be a central concern. Another central theme is what "religion" means as a category for understanding late imperial and modern Chinese history—an issue that will take on very different valences when we look at the 20th century, in which Western models of what religions should look like became increasingly influential among would-be secularizers and many religious activists as well.

This course will look at the four great novels of the Ming dynasty: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, and Plum in the Golden Vase. Deeply self-conscious about the process of their own creation and their place within the larger literary canon, these novels deploy multiple frames, philosophical disquisitions, invented histories, and false starts before the story can properly begin. By focusing on the first twelve chapters of each novel, this course will serve as both an introduction to the masterworks of Chinese vernacular literature and an exploration of the fraught beginnings of a new genre.

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.

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.