Spring

Past scholarship has often reduced the history of Chinese labor to the history of the Chinese labor movement or the history of the Communist Party in its function as “the leading core” of the proletariat. The factory proletariat, of course, was never more than a small segment of the Chinese labor force – less than five percent under the Republic, less than ten in the People’s Republic. Recent work has been more inclusive, looking at work outside the formal sector, in agriculture, handcrafts, and service industries; at the work of women in formal employment and at home; at sex work and emotional work; at unemployment and precarious work; at the work of internal migrants; at Chinese workers abroad; at coerced work in private industry (the 2007 “kiln slaves’ incident”); and at carceral labor in Xinjiang and elsewhere. Most of the readings will deal with work in the Mao and post-Mao years, right up to the present. We will combine readings on Chinese labor history with more general texts on the relationship between productive and reproductive work, wage work and non-wage work, male and female work, autonomous and heteronomous work. The guiding question throughout the course is if a new Chinese labor movement is necessary, possible, or probable, and if it is not, under which conditions it might become so.

Open to both undergraduates and graduates. This course is designed to improve Japanese reading, speaking, writing and listening ability to the advanced high level as measured by the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Proficiency Guidelines. Weekly assignments will require students to tackle modern Japanese texts of varying length and difficulty. Organized around a range of thought-provoking themes (from brain death and organ transplants to Japanese values on work and religion), reading assignments will include academic theses in psychology and anthropology, literary texts, and popular journalism. After completing the readings, students will be encouraged to discuss each topic in class. Videos/DVDs will be used to improve listening comprehension skills. There will also be writing assignments.

This course focuses on learning spoken Japanese that is aimed at native speakers. The goals are getting accustomed to that sort of authentic Japanese and being able to speak with a high degree of fluency. To keep a balance, writing and reading materials are provided. Watching videos and practicing speaking are the keys to success in this course.

The goal of this sequence is to help students develop advanced proficiency in reading, listening, speaking, and writing. This sequence emphasizes more advanced grammatical structures, and requires discussion in Chinese on topics relevant to modern China. Over the course of this sequence, the emphasis will shift to authentic Chinese texts in an effort to better prepare students to deal with orginal Chinese source materials. Class meets for five one-hour sessions each week.

The course is a systematic introduction to pre-modern and early-modern texts written in classical Japanese (bungo or kogo), the standard written language in Japan up to the beginning of the twentieth century. We will learn and absorb the fundamentals of classical Japanese grammar and engage with some of the core grammatical problematics of the language. Throughout the course students will gain a firm foundation in how the language is constructed, increase their comprehension of the language’s vocabulary, and will familiarize themselves with original texts in prose and poetry alike, including narrative fiction (monogatari), anecdotes (setsuwa), essays (zuihitsu), and traditional Japanese poems (waka). The goal is to acquire a firm foundation in the classical language and to be able to read pre-modern texts with the help of a dictionary, for the purpose of academic research.

This is intended to be a reading course in the Shang shu 尚書 or Venerated Documents, also known as the Shu jing 書經or Classic of Documents, traditionally considered to be the second of the Chinese classics (no matter how many classics are included). The contents run the gamut from royal proclamations to ministerial advice, and purport to date from the time of Yao 堯 through the early Eastern Zhou period. For more than two millennia, the text has been the focus of China’s most celebrated textual scholarship, both because of the interest of its content and also because of its inclusion of two different types of documents: what are termed “New Text” chapters and “Old Text” chapters. We will consider both the received text and also recently discovered manuscript versions of several chapters.

This course examines the history of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) from its establishment in the wake of the disintegration of the Mongol empire until its annexation by Japan in the early twentieth century. We will explore topics such as status and gender, ideology and law, diplomacy and invasion, and court politics and rebellion, with an eye to understanding issues including Chosŏn’s social hierarchy and its discontents, slavery, Confucianization, factionalism, obstacles to reform, and the longevity of the dynasty. Readings include recent secondary scholarship and primary sources such as official histories, diaries, law codes, letters, official documents, and inquest records, as well as visual materials. Lecture is combined with discussion. Assignments are a short paper, a Wikipedia project, and a longer final paper. All readings in English. No prior knowledge of Korean history or language is required.

Edmund Buckley was one of the first recipients of the Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago. His dissertation was published in 1895 with the title Phallicism in Japan. As a practitioner of the new “science of religions,” Buckley carried out his field work in Japan and collected hundreds of objects to supplement his historical and comparative research with copious examples of contemporary material culture. These talismans, ritual objects, amulets, maps and guides to Buddhist and Shinto pilgrimage sites, portable statues, shrines for traveling and the home, as well as numerous folk curios (such as phalli and kteis related to his research), were kept by the University of Chicago and, over the decades, were moved many times. They now, or much of them at any rate, reside within the Smart Museum of Art. They are uncatalogued, merely stored there, and are largely unknown.

This course will be an examination of the discipline of religionswissenschaft as it was applied to Japan and the religious worlds therein. Buckley’s work, as well as the remnants of his collection, will serve as a major resource. Moreover, close readings of the works of Anesaki Masaharu, Hori Ichiro, Joseph Kitagawa, Helen Hardacre, and others, will enhance our understanding of the history of this discipline as applied to the religious world of Japan.

In terms of their teachings and practices the Ch’an / Son / Zen  (禅) Buddhist traditions in China, Korea, and Japan differed significantly in their respective cultural parameters even as they shared a Sino-centric body of textual materials. The translation of these shared materials into English occurred sporadically from as early as the late 19th century but was first systematically addressed in Kyoto from the 1960s. Ruth Fuller Sasaki created a Zen practice center and a translation atelier at the Ryosen-an (龍泉庵), a cloister within the Daitokuji (大徳寺) Zen Buddhist temple complex, and staffed it with both leading scholars of Buddhism in Japan and a new generation of Zen practitioners and writers from the West. Many of the original materials from these efforts are now held in the Special Collections of the Regenstein Library here at the University of Chicago.

This course will be an examination of how Zen was initially interpreted, translated, and transmitted from the Sino-centric to the Anglophone world in the mid-20th century. The focus will be the actual notes and draft translations of key Zen texts as worked on at the Ryosen-an and its team of Japan-based scholars and practitioners. Supplemental readings will contextualize these efforts more generally with the history of Zen in the West.

From premodern to modern societies, human beings have been producing material objects that support or enrich their lives in particular social and cultural expressions. In this course, we will investigate the history of craft production and discuss the materials, methods, contexts, and meanings of skilled craft in East Asia. The making of material objects can take numerous forms, and usually involve multiple social groups who rely on different methods of knowing (e.g., tacit or explicit, individually embodied or widely shared). From the imperial and official workshop of early China to the silk weaving household in post-Meiji Japan, and from the handicraft communities in rural China of the twentieth century to the contemporary Korean Hanji paper artist – we will study a diverse range of crafts and consider various ways of making and knowing in relation to creativity and innovation, labor organizations, social structures, as well as statecraft and political power. By engaging with scholarships in history, anthropology, archaeology, art history, material culture, and history of science and technology, we will ask: How are the processes of object-, self-, and world-making intertwined? What is the relationship between making and knowing? How have these different approaches in making and/or knowing evolved alongside broader changes in the history of East Asia? What can they tell us about people’s lives and experiences in a given culture and society?

For the final project, students will have the creative option to remake a historical artifact of East Asia and reflect upon their hands-on experience in this process. All readings will be provided in English.