Winter

The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as “cute” or “adorable”) has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today’s conception of kawaiihas become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called “Pink Globalization”. With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

In this course, we will delve into “big problems” created by the movement, relocation, or displacement of objects that are assigned special cultural, artistic, and historical values in new contexts. We will follow the movement of artifacts across both geographical and disciplinary boundaries, challenging established notions of cultural heritage and art. We often study and read ancient texts as primary sources, but we don’t always pause to consider that those texts were written on physical objects like pieces of wood, leaves, or animal skin. Similarly, we’re familiar with the display of ancient artwork inside museums or galleries, but have we wondered about the journey of individual objects to those new locations? How do objects move from their original place to modern collections? How do they become art? And how do they become historical sources? Guided by an art historian and a social historian, this course presents different ways to look at “objects that move”, both as sources about past societies and as mirrors for contemporary ones. Through studying examples from the history of China and the Middle East, we will reconsider concepts such as cultural heritage, national patrimony, or even art that have been taken for granted. We will learn about the different histories of the dispersal of cultural heritages in those two regions, from nation-building and colonial projects in the twentieth century to the illicit trade in antiquities and the creation of digital replicas today.

This non-core beginner’s course is specially tailored for students who want to learn a new language in a fun and stress-free way. Compared to core courses, this course is more focused on communication activities with hands-on exercises to automatize and internalize simple basic expressions related to their daily lives. This course will provide students with a strong foundation to start learning the language with confidence and comfort.

Designed for non-heritage advanced learners of Korean with fourth-year proficiency or equivalent (as approved by the instructors), this course uses Korean songs as a focal point to enhance language skills while engaging with relevant cultural and historical knowledge of modern and contemporary Korea. By implication, we closely read and listen to selected songs so that we probe to reach a better and deeper understanding of the Korean language as played out in a verse and musical form, on the one hand, and we study the contexts in which the lyric and music are produced, performed, and distributed.

This course introduces big problems created by the movement, relocation or displacement of objects that are assigned special cultural, artistic, and historical values in new contexts. Such objects are often used as historical sources to justify the present, generating competing claims about the past while also raising problems and questions of preservation, ownership, copyright, and access. This class will ask how objects move from their original place to modern collections. How do they become art or part of cultural heritages? And how do they become historical sources? To address these complex issues, we will examine case studies of “moving objects” from two different geographies and historical contexts, China and the Middle East, in a comparative framework. We will discuss both historical and art historical questions stemming from specific objects and their stories in those two regions. We will talk about objects that were forced to move, relocated, or displaced, thereby their significance and value transform or take on new meanings. The dispersal and replication of moving objects in various collections is especially relevant today, with the creation of different types of digital replicas.

After its modern discovery, Dunhuang—the home of Buddhist grottoes constructed between the 4th and 14th centuries—had been a site of intensive research that paved the way for the rise of Dunhuang Studies later in the twentieth century, including research in cave art and retrieved manuscripts. While these earlier endeavors made an indelible contribution to our knowledge of Dunhuang, this course posits a complexity in building the site into the discourse of modern China and a dialectic relationship between modern Dunhuang and the research of historical Dunhuang. To better understand this complexity, this course foregrounds how Dunhuang came to be known and studied in the politics of Western colonialism and the restructuring of modern China. The course will also trace the trajectory in which modern Dunhuang developed through a spectrum of different “representations” –architectural diagrams, photographs, paintings, exhibitions, etc. By focusing on these representations, students will analyze the agenda in the conception of Dunhuang as a site of national pride and heritage and consider its role in narratives of twentieth-century East Asian Art.

This class will survey the constructions of a variety of Others in Cold War Japanese media and literature, including questions of ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender, and species. We will cover primary sources, including literary texts, films, and music, and we we will also read recent secondary scholarship in both English and Japanese relevant to the topic.  A substantial portion of the course readings will be in Japanese.   

Forbes Magazine has styled the Tibetan Buddhist monk Mingyur Rinpoche, “the happiest man alive.” Like no other religion, Buddhism in the public imagination is associated with providing us with an accessible way towards leading a good and happy life. But what is the “good life” according to the Buddhist tradition, and what is “happiness” supposed to lead us towards? In this course, we will explore these questions through a close reading of Buddhist sources in translation. Through these readings the course will introduce the doctrinal and practical foundations of the Buddhist traditions and serve as a gateway to more specialized studies. Course Note: This course counts as a Gateway course for RLST majors/minors.

What is Zen? Impossibly, seemingly, everything to everybody. In this course, we will explore Zen’s protean transformations through a close reading of primary sources in translation. Rather than asking what Zen is, we will focus on how in these materials the Zen traditions are continually de/re-constructed as contingent religious identities from medieval Japan to the contemporary United States and Europe. The focus of the course will be the premodern Japanese Zen tradition, its background in Chinese Chan, and its reception in the West. The course will include field trips to Zen communities in the Chicago area. Students wishing to take this course are strongly encouraged to also take Prof. Ziporyn’s course on Chan during the fall quarter. 

This seminar explores the interplay of history, fantasy, and theatricality in one of the masterpieces of early Qing chuanqi drama, Changsheng dian 长生殿 (Palace of Lasting Life, 1688), Hong Sheng's 洪昇dramatization of the famous tragic romance between the Tang Emperor Xuanzong and his most favored concubine Lady Yang Yuhan.  The play alternates between a restaging of the An Lushan rebellion based on the playwright’s research into historical sources and the creation of a parallel fantastical universe in the forms of purgatory and paradise.  These seemingly contradictory trends—the increased concern with historical accuracy in drama and the fascination with spectacular, supernatural worlds—are fundamental to many seventeenth-century chuanqi plays.  To understand the play’s genealogy, we will read influential earlier treatments of the Xuanzong/ Lady Yang romance, but we will also examine the play in light of its relationship to contemporary events, particularly the fall of the Ming, and to contemporary debates on historical drama and the role of the playwright in the publication and production of theatrical works. The course will include consideration of the “afterlife” of the play by screening some dvds of important live performances.