Spring

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.

Korean intellectuals played a leading role in the rapid transformation of twentieth-century Korean society, and literature provided a crucial space for conveying their thoughts, as well as their social and political imagination. The grave consciousness of social responsibility weighing on their shoulders in particular has been a significant subject of literature and has been often reproduced in popular culture as well. This course examines major works of Korean literature with a focus on two of the most distinctive groups--writers and university students. By doing so, this course explores the history of Korean intellectuals, and their interactions with the public, as well as basic literary and cultural concepts in modern Korea. Along with literary works, films, TV dramas, newspaper and journal articles, visual images, and related scholarly works are also explored in order to help our understanding of the historical and cultural context. The main topics of discussion in class range from Korea’s historical events of colonization and decolonization, collaboration and conversion, and the democratization movement and anti-Americanism, to broader theoretical issues including the Sartrean idea of engaged literature, and global discussions regarding (post)colonialism and intellectuals. All materials are available in English and no previous knowledge of Korean language or literature is necessary.

This course is designed for undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in East Asian languages and in learning or teaching East Asian languages. In this class, we will address significant issues in learning and teaching an East Asian language through key concepts in second language acquisition (SLA) and the analysis of the linguistic characteristics of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. In particular, we will discuss the internal processes of acquisition to begin addressing the (pedagogical) issues pertinent to teaching and learning specific linguistic structures of the East Asian languages. Hence, each week, students will do readings in SLA as well as academic papers for each language on a given topic. For a comparative approach and perspective of the East Asian language and society, we will explore several linguistic and sociolinguistic issues common to the three languages that underlie the linguistic diversity and similarities of East Asia, such as the use of Chinese characters or the development and use of honorifics in China, Japan, and Korea. Such an approach will also allow us to analyze the language influence and interaction among the three languages and how that shapes the culture, society, and language use. The objectives of this course are as follows: (i) to gain a basic knowledge of the structures of East Asian Languages; (ii) to gain a basic understanding of the key theories and concepts in second language acquisition and teaching methodology; and lastly (iii) to gain new insight on East Asian history, culture, and society through the analysis of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese language.

Survey of medical ideas and practices in premodern China.

This course examines Japanese film history from the perspective of youth: films made for, about, and by young people. Starting with 1933’s Dragnet Girl and moving through 2003’s Bright Future, we will study a wide range of films dealing with juvenile delinquency, and ask how the bad boys and girls of the screen reflect and embody the sociocultural crises, ideological debates, and aesthetic aspirations of their times. Young people have long been the Japanese film industry’s largest (and most economically important) demographic group. The ways in which young characters are used to hail, edify, and/or entertain their counterparts in the audience will be closely considered. Readings will mostly be secondary scholarship, but where appropriate we will address contemporaneous fiction and non-fiction texts as well. All readings are in English and available on Chalk.

This course examines dynamic interactions between law and society in China, Japan, and Korea from 1700 through 1950s. The course deals with law as a realm of high politics especially in an age of nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism, but it focuses on family and communal relations, gender and sexuality, and crime and punishment in relations to law because these topics can highlight not only theoretical discussions of law in domestic and international politics but also down-to-earth practices of law and societal implications that followed them. To consider the historically rich experiences of law in East Asian societies, we engage with a body of scholarly works on these topics, actual codes and cases, and novels and films. The aim of the course is to help us to understand how significantly East Asia has had its own local experiences of law that were simultaneously entangled with Western legal thoughts and practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All readings are available in English.