Autumn

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.

This readings and research sequence provides graduate and advanced undergraduate students an opportunity to study the evolving interaction between the social and state institutions of the family and the law. How did this interaction change throughout China's readings of primary and secondary texts drawn from the Qing through the PRC periods will show the effect of structural legal change at the local level of the family. We will read both in translation and in Chinese; but students should expect that the bulk of their primary source research for their final papers due in winter quarter should extend beyond the sources sampled on the autumn syllabus. We will also engage with ongoing debates about the extent of civil law in imperial China. To what extent are legal practices in the Republican era and PRC a legacy of Qing law or Qing custom? How does Chinese society's definition of a crime change over time, and what role does the law play in shaping social attitudes toward different behavior? The class will also include opportunities to reflect upon the overall evolution of China's legal system throughout this dynamic period.

Reading and research in Japanese history, which culminates in a major seminar paper at the end of winter term.

Since the early 1990s, a vibrant field of scholarship has emerged around the histories, politics, and artistic representations of same-sex love in Chinese-language cultures. While responding to the new visibility of diverse expressions of sexual and gender identity in the Sinophone world, these scholarly endeavors also represent an attempt to bring the field of queer studies to bear on area studies. This course aims at familiarizing ourselves with this scholarship, tracing its terminological tensions and shifts and surveying the diverse genealogies and archives that it proposes. An equally important goal will be to read closely some of the key Chinese literary texts, films, and documents that deal with same-sex love, asking whether and how they exceed heteronormative configurations and promote alternative visions of intimacy and community.