Spring

The early Chinese book attributed to Master Zhuang seems to be a patchwork of fables, polemical discussions, arguments, examples, riddles, and lyrical utterances. Although it has been central to the development of both religious Daoism and Buddhism, the book is alien to both traditions. This course offers a careful reading of the work with some of its early commentaries.

How can we reconstruct the life experience of "ordinary" people at a time of revolutionary change? What are the sources for a history of the Chinese revolution? What can we learn from newspaper articles and official publication? What kind of information can we expect to find in unpublished sources, such as letters and diaries? How useful is oral history, and what are its limitations? We will look at internal and "open" publications and at the production of media reports to understand how the official record was created and how information was channeled, at official compilations such as the Selections of Historical Materials (wenshi ziliao), at "raw" reports from provincial archives, and finally at so-called "garbage materials" (laji cailiao), i.e. archival files collect from flea markets and waste paper traders.

This course examines the political, economic, social, cultural, racial, and military aspects of the major Asian wars of the twentieth century (e.g., Pacific, Korean, Vietnam). The first part of the course, pays particular attention to just war doctrines. We then use two to three books for each war (along with several films) to examine alternative approaches to understanding the origins of these wars, their conduct, and their consequences.

This course examines conceptions of desire in ancient China and ancient Greece through an array of early philosophical, literary, historical, legal, and medical texts. We will explore the broader cultural background of the two ancient periods, and engage with theoretical debates on the history of sexuality, feminist and queer studies, and East/West studies.

The course introduces a group of representative cinematic and television dramatic texts with the assumption that the ideas and practices surrounding gender and sexuality have been integral to the development of dramatic art forms in modern Korea. The primary objective is to discuss the ways in which various discourses and features of modern gendering are interwoven into the workings of filmic structure and image-making. While attending to distinctive generic characteristics of film as distinct from literature and of dramatic television as distinguished from film, the course explores the concrete possibilities, challenges, and limits with which cinematic texts address the questions of gender relations and sexuality.

Ever since the introduction of the modern/Western concept of "literature" to the early twentieth century Korea, literary production, consumption, and reproduction have gone hand in hand with the reception of the trends of  "criticism" and "theory" propagated elsewhere, in the West in particular. This course examines the relationship between the ideas of "indigenous" and "foreign" as embodied by Korean writers in the fields of creative writings, journalism, and academia with a view to engaging and interrogating the idea of "national literature" and its institutional manifestations. It further examines artistic and theoretical endeavors by Korean writers and intellectuals to critically reflect upon and move beyond the unquestioned linguistic, ideological, and ethno-national boundaries.

This course will address significant issues in teaching and learning an East Asian language through identification and analysis of specific sociolinguisitic and linguistic characteristics of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. The course will begin with the introduction of linguistic structures of the three East Asian languages to begin discussing the interaction between language acquisition and society. Then, we will explore sociolinguistic issues common to the three languages that underlie the linguistic diversity (and similarities) of East Asia, such as the following topic: (i) the use of Chinese characters, the history of writing reform, and its relation to literacy in East Asian languages; (ii) loan words in East Asian languages, in particular, the use of Chinese characters in modern Japanese and Korean in age of colonialism; (iii) the development and use of honorifics in China, Japan, and Korea, etc. For a comparative approach and perspective to these topics, students will read academic papers for each language on a given topic and discuss the unique sociolinguistic features of each language. Such an approach will allow us to analyze the language influence and interaction among the three languages and how that shapes the culture, society, and language acquisition. Finally, this course will also introduce the field of second language acquisition focusing on how social factors influence L2 learning and acquisition.

This class will explore three sets of paired authors from ancient China and Greece: Herodotus/Sima Qian; Plato/Confucius; Homer/Book of Songs. Topics will include genre, authorship, style, cultural identity, and translation, as well as the historical practice of Greece/China comparative work.

After a general survey of local and oral history studies in 20th century Chinese history, students will examine secondary scholarly literature and primary documents from three ongoing local rural history research projects (a country history, a regional history and a village history). Documents including transcripts of oral interviews and individual life histories, local gazetteers, memorials, edicts, biographies, social surveys, household registrations, essays, and recent county histories. Some of these Chinese documents have English language translations appended. Students will examine two oral history cases studies in detail.

Peking opera (jingju) is the one nationally prominent form of traditional performing arts in China. This course will introduce concepts and methods that can be applied to the study of Peking opera. Emphasis will be put on understanding artistic elements essential to the living tradition of performance - the visual aspects including stylized stage gesture and movement, sets and costumes, and colors; the music and oral transmission. Topics for discussion include "realism", alienation, time and space, connoisseurship, and film. Students will not only engage with scholarly literature that cuts across different disciplines, but also be introduced to a rich body of sources ranging from gramophone recordings, to photographs, opera films and documentaries. Motivated students will also learn some basics of singing and moves. Field trips to Chinese community Peking opera troupes may be arranged. Mandarin a plus but not a prerequisite.