Autumn

An introduction to the reading and study of manuscripts and epigraphy, mainly from the Tang and Song eras.

This course will explore multiple definitions of fascism in relation to modern Japanese culture. We will read works of literature and literary criticism typically identified as fascist, as well as Japanese critiques of fascism, from the 1930s and beyond. We will also read a number of theoretical texts from Japan and elsewhere that analyze fascism as a political and cultural form. There will be two reading tracks, one for students who can read Japanese and one all in English.

Following FDR’s Executive Order 9066 and the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans, Chicago’s Japanese American population exploded beginning in 1943 when the wartime internment camps began to release internees deemed sufficiently ‘loyal’ on the condition that they not reside on the West Coast. More than 20,000 former internees settled in Chicago, creating new communities that persisted for decades with their own institutions and cultural practices—often in the face of racial discrimination, economic hardship, and continuing Cold War suspicions of ‘disloyalty.’ This course traces the history of this local community in terms of questions of collective and individual memory and cultural imagination. With a focus on visual culture (photography, painting, and motion pictures), musical practice, fiction and poetry, and oral history, we will explore the complex legacies of both the prewar and postwar Chicago Japanese American communities, including their alliances and conflicts with other marginalized groups and with more recent immigrants from Japan and elsewhere.

In China, landscape, literally “mountains and waters” (shanshui), has been a primary theme of artistic expression since the tenth century, as revealed most elaborately in two-dimensional works of art. This course surveys major areas of study in the history of Chinese landscape painting from its full bloom in the tenth century to the end of dynastic China in the twentieth century. It aims to equip students with basic knowledge and skills required to analyze the key elements of its pictorial representation, such as format, style, technique, material, etc. On a broader level, the course will investigate topics including religious significance of early landscape images, stylistic analysis and art historical accounts in relation to court and literati arenas, landscape aesthetic and theoretical foundations, and landscape representation as socio-political commentary. Considerable attention will be paid to the inherent features of various portable formats, such as scroll, fan and album leaf, as well as their historical context, viewing convention, audience and social function.

The first quarter of the East Asian civilization sequence examines the politics, society, and culture of East Asia from ancient times until c. 1600. Our focus will be on examining key historical moments and intellectual, social, and cultural trends with an emphasis on the region as a whole. Students will read and discuss culturally significant texts and be introduced to various approaches to analyzing them.

This discussion-based course aims to familiarize EALC PhD students with different aspects of the profession of East Asian Studies. This quarter we will focus on the history of Area Studies through a critical examination of major Anglophone journals in the field. Together we will select the flagship journals in everyone's subfield of study and examine inaugural issues and key debates within their immediate historical contexts. In addition, we will consider how Area Studies has been developing in East Asia.

This course surveys China's turbulent twentieth century through the lens of great trials. From communist show trials to international courts, from struggle sessions to investigative journalism, and from trial by mob to trial by media, students will witness public and private "justice" in action both in and beyond the courtroom and across the long century's radically different governmental regimes. Our view of China will explore both the sweeping events of revolution and individual experiences. There is no prerequisite for this course.

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.

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.

This course studies a selection of popular Korean song lyrics, treating them under the rubric of poetry. Its prerequisite is Korean proficiency of the 4th-year level and above and the student should have the Instructor’s approval in advance.