Spring

Lu Xun (1881-1936) is widely considered the greatest writer of twentieth-century China. Poet, satirist, and a compassionate advocate for social reform, he set the tone for modern Chinese writing and continues to be referenced ubiquitously in Chinese culture today, to the extent that one cannot be said to understand modern China if one does not know Lu Xun. This course is a reading of his short stories, essays, and poetry. In particular, we emphasize his use of literature for social reform and study his writing in conjunction with issues that shaped modern Chinese society: women and gender; nationalism; children and education; biology and evolution; and the relationship between literature and revolution. No knowledge of Chinese is required.

The socialist period (for our purposes here, c. 1949-1980) fundamentally transformed the institutions of Chinese social and economic life. Marriage and family were redefined; rural communities were reorganized on a collective basis; private property in land and other means of production was abolished. Industrialization created a new urban working class, whose access to welfare, consumer goods, and political rights depended to a large extent on their membership in work units (danwei). Migration between city and countryside almost came to a halt, and rural and urban society developed in different directions. This course will focus on the concrete details of how this society functioned. How did state planning work? What was it like to work in a socialist factory? What role did money and consumption play in a planned economy? Our readings are in English, but speakers of Chinese are encouraged to use Chinese materials (first-hand sources, if they can be found) for their final papers. All readings will be posted on Canvas.

This course will consider the intersections between health, healing, and primarily non-Abrahamic religions across East Asia. By reading about, considering, and analyzing conceptions of health and associated healing methods, you will develop the ability to better understand the medical and religious traditions of peoples in East Asia. You will learn to makes sense of religious features such as ritual, spells, pilgrimage, and meditation, including various ways that healers instill calm and confidence in those they treat. These religious features appear strongly in some medical instances, and subtly in “non-religious” medical and psychological contexts. We will compare and contrast these features in the East Asian context and reflect upon their implications for healthcare in the U.S.A. today.

This course explores the ways in which personhood was constituted in early modern China. Focusing on the years 1500–1800—a period marked by commercial expansion, political rupture, ethnic conflict, social fluidity, and literary experimentation—we will ask how the subhuman, the superhuman, and the nonhuman were used to police or subvert traditional hierarchies, to expand or delimit the possibilities of the human and the humane. Areas of discussion will include gods, ghosts, barbarians, women, eunuchs, animals, and things; readings will come from a wide range of sources, including classical tales, vernacular fiction, drama, medical texts, and natural histories.

This course examines key texts from antiquity through the 18th century related to music and sound. “Literature” is construed broadly to include the many genres in which music or sound play a principle part: philosophical and scientific essays; anecdotes, biographies, and tales; poems and informal essays; songbooks, formularies, and scores; encyclopedias and manuals. The course will be organized historically and thematically. Some of the issues we hope to investigate: the role of music in ritual and governance; theories of the voice and sound production; the translation of sound into words, and what is lost and gained; the pictorial representation of sound and listening; the relation between music and emotion; the social roles of musicians and entertainers; and the cultural significance of musical instruments.

This course will be an experiment in juxtaposition. The concept is no more and no less than trying to read in tandem a number of religious and philosophical writings from various corners of world culture which focus on some form of triplicity, triads, trinities, including the Three Hypostases of Neoplatonism, the Christian Trinity, the Hindu Trimurti, the Daoist triad of vitality/energy/spirit, the inter-nested triadic structures of Yang Xiong's Taixuanjing and those of the Hegelian system, the Tiantai Three Truths and its reconfiguration of the Buddhist trikaya, triple gem and other triads, and perhaps others. We will enter into this experiment without any preconceived thesis about what we will find when these things are looked at all together, working together to develop ad hoc hypotheses about how these triads function, why they are so prevalent, what each one can teach us about all the others and vice versa. It is a genuine experiment in that we do not know what will happen when these elements are combined, and we adopt an attitude of reverent expectation and a willingness to follow it wherever it may lead.

This course will focus on close readings of primary texts in Chinese concerning the polemics around the introduction of Christianity into China in the Ming Dynasty, starting with Matteo Ricci's introduction of Catholic doctrine in his 天主實義 and the polemical responses to it from mainly Confucian and Buddhist authors, with special attention to the metaphysical premises of the conflicting traditions, and more generally what might be at stake in them.

Throughout the centuries, Buddhism has developed a unique and immensely diverse visual culture. Indeed, attention to the visual may well be one of the fundamental characteristics of this religious tradition, to the point that Buddhism in China was known as the “teachings of images” (xiang jiao). This course explores the rich world of Buddhist visual culture through a focus on some of its most representative aspects. We begin with a discussion of the Buddha’s absence and the need for representations in the Indian context. Next, we study forms of meditation and visualization in China and Japan, together with dream-making technologies and dreamscapes. Then, we move into the complex world of Buddhist material artifacts in East Asia (images, mandalas, temple architecture, and Buddhist fashioning of landscape). Toward the end of the course, we examine material that is rarely studied in terms of Buddhist visual culture, namely, maps and visions of the world (Indian, Chinese, and Japanese models), and the cultural components of display of Buddhist objects at temples and museums. The course concludes with theoretical considerations on the dichotomies of absence/presence and visible/invisible that seem to characterize much of Buddhist visual culture. Through an analysis and discussion of a wide set of readings, ranging from Buddhist meditation texts to studies of visualizations, dreams, icons, and the landscape, from practices of display to acts of iconoclastic destruction, this course aims at offering a wider conceptualization of visuality in Buddhism, not confined to consideration of art.

Why does disability matter to East Asia? This course uses this overarching question to anchor discussions on the role disability plays in historical and contemporary issues of social inequality and human rights in China, Japan and Korea. Students will think critically about disability identities, institutions, theories, experiences, and interactions that have made disability what it is today. We will learn to narrate disability from a wide range of sources that represent bodily impairments (blindness, madness, autism, trauma, deformities etc.) in medicine, literature and film, and to relate disability narratives to theoretical debates over stigma, medicalization, the politics of inclusion and exclusion, and human rights. We will also to look more closely into the lives of “disabled persons”—who they are, how they are disabled and by what circumstances, how they identify themselves and are represented in different media. More broadly, this course unsettles the concept of East Asia by making sense of disability as “difference” and to think about how it may expand our “mainstream” assumptions of body, culture and society.

“Religious freedom” is enshrined in not only liberal democratic constitutions but also in constitutions of socialist nation-states such as North Korea, although the latter are frequently dismissed by the West as veneers of democracy. The concept of “religious freedom” has been used by the West (i.e. United States) to categorize the world into “modern” and “anti-modern,” “free” and “communist” throughout the Cold War. Yet, how did “religion” emerge as a category in East Asia? What did “religious freedom” mean in the context of occupations, divisions and hot/cold war? How was religion managed by states, and how did religious communities negotiate with local and global political currents? By pivoting to East Asia as a privileged site of analysis, this course will interrogate the notions of “religion” and “religious freedom” as they were articulated and mobilized for various motives. Core areas of analysis will include the relationship between religion and state-building, religion and human rights, and religion and empire. Moreover, this course decouples the temporal qualifier “Cold War” from “East Asia” to challenge conventional demarcations of the Cold War (1945-1991), for its “end” is still a contested discussion.