Global Arc

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.

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.

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.

The course purports to introduce students to various topics in the history of ideas in Japan between 1600 and 1945 as well as to the social and political influence that these ideas had in the three centuries and a half of revolutionary changes from premodernity to the end of the Second World War. It introduces first the language and worldviews of various schools of thought that flourished between 1600 and 1868; it then surveys the main ideas that accompanied Japanese modernization and scientific developments in the late nineteenth century and the birth of modern Japanese philosophy in the twentieth century.

The course examines the interplay between architecture and the built environment on the one hand and political belief ideas on the other. Our focus is on the twentieth century, sometimes dubbed an "age of ideologies." We will not assume that ideas are in uncomplicated ways reflected in architecture, nor that the descriptions architects give of their own work and intentions can be taken at face value. Students will become familiar with major architectural theories, different approaches in political theory, and also learn how to craft arguments at the intersection of politics and aesthetics.

A study of the fantastic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and in a selection of theoretical texts. Issues to be discussed include the relation of the fantastic to neighboring genres such as magical realism, the cognitive challenges it poses, thematic preoccupations such as the double and altered sensory states, the importance of reception, and interdisciplinary approaches drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary theory.

This course will offer an intensive introduction to the history of the making, distribution and reading of books in the West, from ancient Greece to modern America. By examining a series of case studies, we will see how writers, producers, and readers of books have interacted, and how the conditions of production and consumption have changed over time.

When the sum of our pains surpasses that of our pleasures, non-existence becomes preferable to existence. This argument became ubiquitous in Enlightenment philosophical debates. Many used it to discuss the rationality of suicide, God's creation, religious faith, as well as the metaphysical grounds of human existence and the idea of progress. Some criticized the quantitative premises of the argument and questioned the idea that pain could change the positive value of human existence into a negative one. We will examine those debates in philosophical and literary texts and discuss their later and contemporary echoes in ethics.

Following Italian unification Massimo d'Azaglio remarked, "Italy has been made; now it remains to make Italians." This course examines the art and architectural movements of the roughly 100 years between the1848 uprising and the beginning of the World War II, a critical period for defining italianità. Topics include the paintings of the Macchiaioli, reactions to the 1848 uprisings and the Italian Independendence Wars, the politics of 19th Century architectural restoration in Italy, the re-urbanization of Italy's new capital Rome, Fascist architecture and urbanism, and the architecture of Italy's African colonies.