Spring

Part 3 of this three-quarter sequence introduces the fundamentals of modern Chinese to bilingual speakers. Bilingual Speakers are those who can speak Chinese but do not know how to read or write. By the end of the spring quarter, students should have a basic knowledge of Chinese grammar and vocabulary. Listening, speaking, reading, and writing are equally emphasized. Accurate pronunciation is also stressed. A video project is required in spring quarter, which will be entered in the competition for the Chinese Video Project Award. Class meets for three one-hour sessions each week MWF.

Part 3 of this three-quarter sequence introduces the fundamentals of modern Chinese. By the end of the spring quarter, students should have a basic knowledge of Chinese grammar and vocabulary. Listening, speaking, reading, and writing are equally emphasized. Accurate pronunciation is also stressed. A video project is required in spring quarter, which will be entered in the competition for the Chinese Video Project Award. Class meets for five one-hour sessions each week. Additional small group discussions of 40 minutes per week will be arranged. Maximum enrollment for each section is 18. Must be taken for a letter grade. No auditors permitted.

This hands-on reading and research course aims to give graduate students the linguistic skills needed to locate, read, and analyze archival documents from the People's Republic of China. We will begin by discussing the functions and structure of Chinese archives at the central, provincial, and county level. Next we will read and translate sample documents drawn from different archives. These may include police reports, personnel files, internal memos, minutes of meetings, etc. Our aim here is to understand the conventions of a highly standardized communication system - for example, how does a report or petition from an inferior to a superior office differ from a top-down directive or circular, or from a lateral communication between adminstrations of equal rank? We will also read "sub-archival" documents, i.e. texts that are of interest to the historian but did not make it into state archives, such as letters, diaries, contracts, and private notebooks. The texts we will read are selected to cast light on the everyday life of "ordinary" people in the Maoist period. The target group for the course are graduate students and advanced undergraduates with good Chinese reading skills.

The course will cover a selection of works in biji and zaji form from the Song to Qing dynasties. Part of the interest of the form is its inclusiveness, which has made it hard to place on maps of genre. These works include scientific investigation, social commentary, travel accounts, classical interpretation, personal reminiscences, tales and gossip, art appreciation, responses to poetry, and many other things, combined in an apparently associative manner. We will read both for topical interest and for understanding of the form.

This quarter we will read selected tales from Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異, Pu Songling's蒲松齡seventeenth-century masterpiece. Problems to be addressed include how to deal with allusions (diangu 典故) and engage with period/ individual style in literary Chinese. We will work on not only understanding the meaning of the text but also on producing stage by stage polished English translations.

Introduction to the Chinese literary language from the first millennium B.C.E. to the end of the imperial period. While surveying a variety of literary genres (such as, philosophical and historical texts, poetry, and essays), focus is on grammatical structures and translation methods.

Introduction to the Chinese literary language from the first millennium B.C.E. to the end of the imperial period. While surveying a variety of literary genres (such as, philosophical and historical texts, poetry, and essays), focus is on grammatical structures and translation methods.

This course will consist of the close reading and discussion of primary texts (in translation) of the Chan and Zen Buddhism of China and Japan, with a few secondary descriptions of Zen institutions and cultural influences. This will be done both with an eye to the historical development of these schools of thought and practice within the context of East Asian Buddhism in general, and for whatever transhistorical valences we care to derive from the texts.

Timed to coincide with the Busan Biennale's Chicago Chapter, a series of events and exchanges with artists and organizers of the project, this interdisciplinary class will examine the context of the biennale and respond to works in the show-- giving special attention to the interplay between sound, text, and image. Using Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky's Picture at an Exhibition as inspiration, artists, musicians, and writers from South Korea and around the world were invited to respond to both the city of Busan and to each other's work. Similarly, we will likewise read, listen, and look at the work and create projects while considering our own context here in the city of Chicago. Students will be asked to complete one short writing assignment, one short creative piece, and develop a larger project. Weekly reading assignments will be discussed, drawing mainly from the Biennale reader and other artist writings that will guide our thinking about artistic practice across mediums and the nexus of artistic writing and conceptual art more broadly. What kind of artworks will emerge from this encounter with an international biennale? What is the meaning of interdisciplinarity and experimental form when conventional forms of exhibition making that have been so upended by the pandemic? These are just a few of the questions that will guide our inquiry during the seminar.

This course introduces students to the history of the Cold War through the comparative study of its front lines: divided Korea and Germany. Germany and Korea shared little in common—culturally, geopolitically, and historically—before 1945. And yet for both nations, the end of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War brought with it the near parallel division of their societies into two mutually antagonistic states, each allied with the opposing ideological camp. To what extent did the experience of division and marginality in the bifurcated world order give both Germanys and Koreas simultaneously unique and yet similar experiences of the conflict? To answer this question, we will examine how the Cold War shaped conflicts over culture, consumption, and power in all four states while following how each positioned themselves on the international stage vis-à-vis each other, the superpowers, and the "Third World." This course requires neither background knowledge of Korean or German languages, nor these regions' histories, nor previous coursework in history.