Winter

Part 2 of this three-quarter sequence introduces the fundamentals of modern Chinese to bilingual speakers. Bilingual Speakers are those who can speak Chinese but do not know how to read or write. By the end of the spring quarter, students should have a basic knowledge of Chinese grammar and vocabulary. Listening, speaking, reading, and writing are equally emphasized. Accurate pronunciation is also stressed. A video project is required in spring quarter, which will be entered in the competition for the Chinese Video Project Award. Class meets for three one-hour sessions each week MWF.

Part 2 of this three-quarter sequence introduces the fundamentals of modern Chinese. By the end of the spring quarter, students should have a basic knowledge of Chinese grammar and vocabulary. Listening, speaking, reading, and writing are equally emphasized. Accurate pronunciation is also stressed. A video project is required in spring quarter, which will be entered in the competition for the Chinese Video Project Award. Class meets for five one-hour sessions each week. Additional small group discussions of 40 minutes per week will be arranged. Maximum enrollment for each section is 18. Must be taken for a letter grade. No auditors permitted.

Fulfills translation requirement for EALC graduate students. Must be arranged with individual faculty member. Register by section with EALC faculty.

Independent reading course.

For course description contact East Asian Languages.

Anyang is one of the most important archaeological sites in China. The discoveries of inscribed oracle bones, the royal cemetery, clusters of palatial structures, and industrial-scale craft production precincts have all established that the site was indeed the last capital of the Shang dynasty recorded in traditional historiography. With almost continuous excavations since the late 1920s, work at Anyang has in many ways shaped and defined Chinese archaeology and the study of Early Bronze Age China. This course intends to examine the history of research, important archaeological finds, and the role of Anyang studies in the field of Chinese archaeology. While the emphasis is on archaeological finds and the related research, this course will also attempt to define Anyang in the modern social and cultural contexts in terms of world heritage, national and local identity, and the looting and illegal trade of antiquities.

This seminar serves as an introduction to theories of media and mediation in the context of scholarship on East Asia. “Media” has come to be a ubiquitous term in how we think not just about technologies of communication and dissemination, but about literature, music, film, digital art, and other forms of cultural production. We will look at how the concept has been taken up in recent scholarly work on China, Japan, and Korea, and raise questions about how this research draws on media theories from elsewhere; how it seeks to develop or recover locally inflected theories of media; and how we might distinguish between the two. Specific media covered include writing, the book, music, television, film, and digital platforms. A portion of the course will also be dedicated to thinking and learning about how to acquire and analyze materials from online sources using digital tools. The past and present intersection of media history with area studies concerns will thus be as much of a focus as the future this dialogue holds.

This course will provide an overview of Chinese unearthed documents of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, including both bronze and stone inscriptions and also bamboo and silk manuscripts. By reading selections from these materials, we will seek to gain a general sense of both how they were produced and used at the time and also how their modern study has evolved.

This seminar probes the interplay of history, politics, and theatricality in Kong Shangren's Peach Blossom Fan, his dramatic masterpiece of 1699, which brilliantly depicts the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644-1645 on multiple social, cultural, and ritual fronts, from the pleasure quarters and the imperial court to the Confucian Temple and the battlefield.  Issues to be addressed include: the representation and reassessment of late Ming entertainment culture--courtesans, actors, storytellers, musicians, booksellers, painters; metatheatricality; memory and commemoration; props and material culture; the dissemination of news and (mis)information; the reenactment of the past on the stage, as we contextualize Peach Blossom Fan within the early Qing literary and theatrical world in which it was created and performed. We'll also examine the interplay of history, politics, and theatricality in the modern reception of the play by analyzing its modern and contemporary incarnations in spoken drama, feature film, and different operatic genres.