Winter

This course will explore the cultural and cultural history of Edo/Tokyo from its origins in the early seventeenth century through c. 1945. Issues to be explored include the configuration of urban space and its transformation over time in relation to issues of status, class, and political authority, the formation of the "city person" as a form of identity, and the tensions between the real city of lived experience and the imagined city of art and literature. We will pay particular attention to two periods of transformation, the 1870s when the modernizing state made Tokyo its capital, and the period of reconstruction after the devastating earthquake of 1923. Assignments include a final research paper of approximately 15-18 pages.

This class provides an overview of major developments in Chinese social history from the high Qing period (roughly the eighteenth century) until very recent times. It focuses on the lives of “ordinary people,” especially in the countryside, where over 80 percent of China’s population lived until roughly 1980, and over 40 percent still live today. Topics include family organization, relations between the generations, and gender roles; property rights, class relations, and their implications for economic activity; the nature of village communities and their relationship to political/legal authority; migration, frontier settlement, and changes in ethnic and national identity; twentieth-century urbanization, consumerism, and changing notions of the individual; and collective protest, violence, and revolution. A secondary theme is more theoretical: what is it possible to know about the lives of people who left few records of their own, and how do we evaluate what are often, inevitably, thinly documented claims? The class format will include a lot of lecture, but mixed with both in-class and online discussion. No background knowledge is required.

This course will survey the uses to which writing was put in China during the period 1200-200 B.C., and then, more briefly, in Japan during the period A.D. 600-900.  We will be concerned both with the mechanics of writing itself and with its role in society. The survey will be broken into four discrete topics: the invention of writing in China, the nature of the Chinese script, the uses to which writing was put during its first thousand years in China, and early writing in Korea and Japan. All reading will be in English, though some knowledge of an East Asian language will be useful.

This course will help students to understand the present-day situations of a wide array of religions that exist in the mainland Chinese society, including popular religion, Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism, New Religious Movements, and Islam. We will discuss their institutional practices, positions in the society, relations with the state and the economy. The course will also examine how the present-day conditions came into being, by tracing to the traditional model of late imperial China (1368－1911), and investigating how changes occurred in Republican China (1911－1949), why the Maoist period (1949－1976) was the turning point, and how a new religious situation with characteristics distinct from the traditional model has been emerging in post-Mao China. We will make reference to the religious situations in Taiwan to illustrate the distinctiveness of the case of mainland China.

This course covers the history of Chinese theater from its emergence as a full-fledged art  form in the 10th-11th centuries (the Northern Song) up through its incorporation into modern urban life and nationalist discourse in the first decades of the 20th century (the Republican period). In addition to reading selections from masterpieces of Chinese dramatic literature such as Orphan of Zhao, Romance of the Western Chamber, The Peony Pavilion, we will pay particular attention to the different types of venues, occasions, and performance practices associated with different genres of opera at different moments in time. A central theme will be the changing status of the entertainer and the cultural meanings assigned to acting.  All texts to be read in English translation.

In recent years, the project of the artist's monograph has been subjected to criticism and analysis, yet the single-artist study remains important to our discipline. These methodological reflections should be taken seriously in the case of East Asia, where notions of the (primarily male) artist or painter and his place in society prior to the twentieth century must be evaluated on their own terms. Drawing on both premodern and modern cases, this course proposes to do just that, reading primary texts where possible and evaluating a range of recent monographs. When and how do European and American tropes of the artist enter the picture? How do ethnic and regional background, gender, medium, and socioeconomic status complicate the narration of the Asian and Asian American artist? How well does art historical writing accommodate the type of visual knowledge that can only be gained by in-depth contemplation of the artist's works? For the final paper, students are encouraged to present a case study or comparison of their choice drawn from East Asia and beyond.

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 also about literature, music, film, and other forms of cultural production. In this course we will look at how the concept has been taken up in recent work on China, Japan, and Korea, and raise questions about how this work has drawn on media theories from elsewhere; how it has sought to develop or recover locally inflected theories of media; and how it is we might distinguish between the two. Our task, then, will be to consider how media theory and media history have been done, but also to speculate on how they can and should be done within an area studies framework.