Winter

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.

The seminar topic is the formation of Warring States correlative thought as evidenced by excavated manuscripts, with focus on the Tsinghua University looted Warring States bamboo-slip manuscript "Wuji" 五紀 (Five structural strands)

In this in-depth introduction to modern Chinese literature we will combine close readings of texts with a survey of the ideas, media, and institutions that shaped literary practices from the 1900s to the early 1940s. We will discuss authors, literary circles and associations, journals and publishers, as well as notions of self, language, and community. In doing so, we will pursue the following questions: What is a “modern Chinese literary text,” and what are its relevant “contexts”? How to connect literary writing—per se a highly individualized and largely solitary activity—with the forms of sociality and the collaborative practices in which it is embedded? How did various communities and institutions affect, and how were they affected by, the writing and reading of literature? Our focus will be on the ways in which authors and groups redefined the functions of literature in times of upheaval, the transformations in language and media that shaped their efforts, and the ways in which they conceived of and sought to reach out to readers. Our explorations will be both historical and historiographical, and will touch on the main debates in modern Chinese literary studies today. All assigned readings are in English translation, but students who read Chinese are encouraged to read the original texts.