Autumn

Introduction to the Chinese literary language from the first millennium B.C.E. to the end of the imperial period. While surveying a variety of literary genres (such as, philosophical and historical texts, poetry, and essays), focus is on grammatical structures and translation methods.

Introduction to the Chinese literary language from the first millennium B.C.E. to the end of the imperial period. While surveying a variety of literary genres (such as, philosophical and historical texts, poetry, and essays), focus is on grammatical structures and translation methods.

The late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the intensification of nationalist and anti-colonial movements in Asia. What understandings of imperialism did these different movements develop? How and why did those movements take such divergent paths in their anti-colonial struggles? And despite these divergences, what similar political, social, and economic trends animated them? This class will explore the connections and disparities between emergent nationalisms in India, China, and Japan. Instead of accepting distinctions between East and South Asia or between colonialism and semi-colonialism as proof of incomparability, this class will use the differences between these three countries to develop a comprehensive understanding of the various ways that societies responded to the threat of foreign rule and encroachment. By reading a combination of primary and secondary sources, students will discover the indelible influence that resistance to imperialism had on the development of nationalist thought in these three societies, even as that resistance took on increasingly different forms as time passed. Beginning with efforts in the late-nineteenth century to categorize their position in a global hierarchy vis-à-vis the Western powers, this course then tracks the ways that Japanese, Indian, and Chinese nationalisms took on similar shapes in different contexts before rapidly diverging in the early twentieth century.

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.

For the past century, the artist’s monograph –the ‘life and works’ account- has been a mainstay of museum research and art historical publication, even though the genre has been garnering criticism for some time. In the wake of the deconstruction of the author and the emergence of new theories of subjecthood, what is to be gained by writing an extended study of a single artist? Is the model hopelessly encumbered by assumptions about the artist as (white, male) creator-genius, or is there still something important to be accomplished by the intimate study of an individual and her works? How is this project affected as we turn our attention to artists in different centuries and locales?

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 surveys a variety of scholarly approaches to the study of popular music in East Asia since 1900, including questions of authenticity, gender, media technologies, circulation, and translation. The course will introduce a variety of musical genres from China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, ranging from forms considered 'traditional' to contemporary idol and hiphop music.

A survey of recent work in the study of premodern Chinese religion, with an emphasis on questions of method.

This course meets the HS or SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.

This seminar will explore problems of world literature and worlding in relation to early modern and modern Japanese literature. We will read recent theoretical and scholarly studies on the problem of world literature and read a variety of works of Japanese literature stretching from eighteenth century to the contemporary period in relation to this question. There will be two reading tracks in the course, one for students who are able to read in Japanese and one for students whose reading will be entirely in English.

The role of space in everyday life has acquired a newfound prominence in light of recent events, as exemplified in the emergence of terms like “social distancing” and “quarantine” as common parlance. Approaching the implications of this from a different angle through an examination of how spatial imaginings travel across time and medium, we will explore questions of space as they are bound up with problems of gender, exile, aesthetics, and performance. How is space imagined and evoked across different media? How might attention to this question lead us to rethink the way that space mediates our experiences of our surroundings? While Japan will be our primary geographic topos, we will interrogate an understanding of these spatialities as ‘Japanese’ by surveying the role they come to play in discourses of both ‘Japanese-ness’ and Western modernism. We will pay special attention to performance (namely, nō dance-drama); however, we will also take up short stories, novels, film and more. Centering our investigations on modern and contemporary cultural production, our travels will also take us through premodern terrain to trace the multiple axes along which our diverse array of objects circulate. Figures considered include: Murata Sayaka, Gaston Bachelard, Hori Tatsuo, Doreen Massey, Mishima Yukio, Ōe Kenzaburō, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats. All readings will be in English.