Global Arc

The course will cover major writers and works of the 20th century. We will examine how Japanese writers responded to modern fictional and linguistic forms imported from the West, how they negotiated what they had inherited from their long and illustrious literary past, and how postwar writers view their newly "democratized" world.

This is a survey of modern Korean fiction from the last decades of the 19th century to the present. Given the myriad transformations and conflicts of this period, the scope of readings will be wide, encompassing primary and critical texts, as well as writing from South and North Korea, Japan, and the United States. Closest attention will be paid to the literary works themselves. Thematic concerns will encompass modernity, colonialism, ideological division, democratization, gender, and diaspora. All texts in English.

Video games have in the last 40 years morphed from lab experiments at MIT into a billion-dollar worldwide entertainment. How can we engage with this fast growing media platform in a critically engaged and humanities-based manner? This class does so by placing video-game culture in a much longer, two-thousand year old East Asian history of media transformations. Starting with a single historical event, The Three Kingdoms, we trace how this event was renarrativized and remediated through many incarnations from official dynastic history to contemporary video game and from Chinese novel and Japanese game to American gaming communities.

An exploration of Japanese labor, gender and feminism, crime and social control, race and notions of homogeneity, nationalism and youth culture. The course considers Japan's struggle to come to terms with the West while at the same time integrating its past. It also looks at American misperceptions of Japanese society and economics. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course is an introduction to the societies, cultures, and politics of contemporary East Asia. The rise of East Asia has inspired Western observers to reflect on the ways in which capitalism, democracy, and modern social relationships can unfold in different ways, shaping the landscape of daily social life. East Asian societies have attempted to emphasize equality, shared values, and a strong state presence; at the same time such values have come at significant cost in each case. The course focuses on China, Japan, and Korea (chiefly South Korea) and examines themes of economy, romance & family, authority, identity, and social ideals.

This course provides an overview of Chinese martial arts fiction and film from earliest times to the present day. The focus will be on the close-reading of literary, art-historical, and cinematic texts, but will also include discussion of the significance of these works against their broader historical and social background. Topics to be discussed: the literary/cinematic pleasure of watching violence, the relationship between violence and the law, gender ambiguity and the woman warrior, the imperial and (trans)national order of martial arts cinema, and the moral and physical economy of vengeance.

The development of classical Chinese literature, traced through close readings of original texts in English translation. Topics include the nature of the Chinese language and writing system, classical literary thought, religious and philosophical influences, dominance of poetry, emergence of historical writing, and vernacular fiction. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course is an introduction to contemporary Chinese cinemas in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. From postwar musicals and pan-Asian blockbusters, to new wave avant-garde films and experimental documentaries, the diversity of Chinese cinemas reflects cinema's relations to global capitalism, Asia's democratization movements, financial crises, and the arrival of (post)socialism. Creating urban nomads, songstresses, daydreamers, travelers, and terrorists, Chinese cinemas put on full display the forces of globalization in shaping the aesthetics and politics of film. Selections broadly include popular commercial films to rare art house productions.

Chinese culture and history contain an abundance of sounds with distinctive timbres. They have been experienced, imagined and theorized locally and in cross-cultural dialogues. People from different times and cultures often experience them in mediated forms such as literary and graphic descriptions. This course offers an introduction to these sonic phenomena. Comparative and transmedia approaches are used to tackle their multicultural repercussions while giving equal attention to their socio-historic contexts. Students will gain an overview of the Chinese soundscape, aided by methods of sound studies and literary/cultural criticism.

This course focuses on the images of women in Korean cultural production, spanning from contemporary to pre-twentieth-century periods. Analyzing the historical variations in the notions of femininity that appear in literary and filmic texts, we will use these feminine images as access points to the aesthetic conundrums produced at crucial historical junctures. These feminine images, produced locally and globally, will allow us to examine the experiences of immigrant diaspora, Korea's neo-colonial relationship with the United States, the Korean War, colonial modernity, and Confucian patriarchal kinship.