Global Arc

This course provides an introduction to the Japanese literary tradition, with a focus on narratives of passion and renunciation. Love poems are found among the earliest Japanese writings, but they stand side-by-side with Buddhist-influenced works that stress the suffering inherent in emotional attachment. We will trace this binary of longing and denial through early folksongs, palace gossip, pious sermons, and ghostly pantomimes, against the changing backdrop of Japan's social and intellectual history. No knowledge of Japanese required.

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.

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 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 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.

This course tells the epic story of the people, ideas, and institutions that made the first Chinese empires, ca. third century BCE to the first century BCE. The course looks at the rise and fall of the Qin empire as well as the way Qin institutions and ideas reverberated through the succeeding Han dynasty--and beyond. Course will cover most recent archeological materials and excavated texts (in translation), including ongoing excavations of the terracotta warriors, funerary art, excavated legal codes, legal cases, religious and philosophical texts, and much more. Finally, we ask: did the Qin empire ever end?

In telling histories of East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, various groups of nomadic people often loomed large in the background and served as the foil to the travail of their sedentary neighbors. In this course we put the nomadic peoples of Inner Asia front and center, and ask how the nomadic way of life and mode of state building served as agents of change in pre-modern Eurasia.

Designed to introduce departmental majors in the fall of their junior year, to the tools, methodologies, and topics related to the study of East Asian history and culture. The focus of the course will vary each year, and will be cross-national and multidisciplinary, covering both premodern and modern periods. One three-hour seminar.