Spring

This course explores the predominant significance of materials, rather than image or style, in conveying the intended meaning of works of art and in manifesting artists’ aesthetic judgement or social critique. These materials can be natural or artificial, personal or generic. They are “selected” either collectively or individually to become the major means of making art over a significant period in history or an artist's career. What are the sources of power of such materials? How are they transformed into works of art? What are their connections with technology, environment, economy, society, religion, culture, and personal experience? Students are expected to conduct individual studies on selected cases (from any time in Chinese history) and to actively respond to other presentations.

KORE 21300 is the third course in the fourth-year Korean sequence. Students will learn basic principles, methods, and techniques in translation and apply appropriate strategies to the practice and description of translation. They will watch pre-recorded lecture videos, complete weekly translation assignments (Korean to English and English to Korean), and participate in group or individual sessions to discuss their translation work. Students will also choose a literary work or text of their choice for their final translation project. The materials covered in this class include medical guidelines, campaign flyers, newspaper articles, reports, brochures, resumes, business and academic emails, and editorials. This course meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays for eighty minutes.  

The third quarter of the East Asian civilization sequence covers the emerging nation-states of China, Korea, and Japan in the context of Western and Japanese imperialism and the rise of an interconnected global economy. Our themes include industrialization and urbanization, state strengthening and nation-building, the rise of social movements and mass politics, the impact of Japanese colonialism on the homeland and the colonies, East Asia in the context of US-Soviet rivalry, and the return of the region to the center of the global economy in the postwar years. Similar to the first and second quarters, we will look at East Asia as an integrated region, connected by trade and cultural exchange even when divided into opposing blocs during the Cold War. As much as possible, we will look beyond nation-states and their policies at underlying trends shared by the three East Asian nations, such as demographic change, changes in gender roles, and the rise of consumer culture.

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.