Courses

An introduction to the literature, culture, and thought of premodern China, from the beginnings of the written record to the turn of the twentieth century. Close study of textual and visual primary sources, with attention to their historical and cultural backdrops.

A reading of the central work of prose fiction in the Japanese classical tradition in its entirety (in English translation) along with some examples of predecessors, parodies, and adaptations (the latter include Noh plays and twentieth-century short stories). Topics of discussion include narrative form, poetics, gendered authorship and readership, and the processes and premises that have given The Tale of Genji its place in “world literature.” Attention will also be given to the text’s special relationship to visual culture.

Exploration of the rich intellectual landscape of the Chinese middle ages, introducing students to seminal works of Chinese civilization and to the history of their debate and interpretation in the first millennium. No previous knowledge of China is assumed. Instead, the course serves as a focused introduction to Chinese philosophy, religion, and literature.

This course explores the “fantastic” in premodern Chinese literature from the first millennium BCE up until late imperial China. Students engage critically with a selection of masterpieces and examine the historical and cultural specificity of what constitutes the “fantastic.” The course takes a chronological approach, and within the chronology, each class focuses on a specific theme, such as shifting boundaries of human/non-human, the aestheticization of female ghosts, and the use of the fantastic as social criticism and allegory.

Core concepts and traditions of classical Japanese poetry explored through the medium of translation. Readings from anthologies and treatises of the ninth through early twentieth centuries. Attention to recent critical studies in transcultural poetic theory. Inspection and discussion of related artifacts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Yale University Art Gallery. 

Japanese literature and art from the 1920s through the 1940s. The avant-garde and mass culture; popular genre fiction; the advent of new media technologies and techniques; effects of Japanese imperialism, militarism, and fascism on cultural production; experimental writers and artists and their resistance to, or complicity with, the state.

What happened to socialism? This course offers an in-depth exploration of this question through the lens of Chinese cinema, from its early days in the early 20th century to the contemporary era. Students examine China's social, political, and cultural transformations, from heteronomy to autonomy, and the ideological transition from socialism to postsocialism. Is socialism with Chinese characteristics interchangeable with capitalism with Chinese characteristics? What impact has revolutionary politics had on Chinese cinema? What is feminism with Chinese characteristics? How do the radical transformations that occurred in China during the 1980s and 1990s manifest in the aesthetics and narratives of Chinese films? How have spatial consciousness and construction of images informed filmmaking in China? How are the sentiments of alienation, disconnection, and displacement depicted in Chinese films? Does globalization bring us closer together or push us towards solitude? The course explores these questions by delving into the cultural dynamics of China's changing identities and ideologies in response to its integration into capitalist globalization. Topics include the evolution of Chinese film generations, cultural politics, postsocialist decay, aesthetics and method of seeing, kinship and love, violence and solitude, fragmentation and disconnection, and feminism with Chinese characteristics in Chinese films. Students critically analyze films by renowned Chinese directors such as Xie Jin, Chen Kaige, Feng Xiaogang, Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye, Zhang Yimou, and Huang Shuqin.

This course is an introduction to Japanese literature written in the last fifty years, with a focus on women writers. We read poetry and prose featuring mothers, daughters, and lovers, novels that follow convenience and thrift store workers, and poetry about factory girls. Our reading takes us from the daily grind of contemporary Tokyo to dystopian futures, from 1970s suburbia to surreal dreamscapes. We attend carefully to the ways in which different writers craft their works and, in particular, to their representation of feelings and affects. Whether the dull ache of loneliness, the oppression of boredom or the heavy weight of fatigue, it is often something about the mood of a work–rather than its narrative–that leaves a distinct impression. We develop the tools to analyze and discuss this sense of distinctness, as well as discover ways to stage connections and comparisons between the works we read. 

In this course, students read key works of Korean literature in English translation from the early twentieth century to the present day. The specific course topic varies by semester. Primary sources include long-form novels, short stories, poetry, and nonfiction writing by representative authors, as well as literary scholarship on themes and historical context relevant to the materials. The readings in this course are arranged in roughly chronological order, requiring us to examine Korea’s colonial modernization process in the first half of the twentieth century, the authoritarian regimes of South Korea from 1948 to 87, and South Korea’s integration into the neoliberal world order after democratization. Supplementary audio-visual materials such as artwork, video clips and music may be presented to students in class.

This course introduces students to the lasting effects of the Japanese Empire, both on modern Japan and East Asia more broadly. We will cover the emergence of the empire in relation to European colonialism, the effects of pan-Asianism within the empire, and the transition from empire to democracy under American occupation. Specific attention will be paid to cultural artefacts such as literature, film, and media; the ways in which contemporary Japan is shaped by this history in terms of diaspora, migration, and cultural nationalism; and the productive connections between postcolonial East Asia and more established forms of postcolonial criticism.

The development of Japanese cinema after the breakdown of the studio system, through the revival of the late 1990s, and to the present.

In this course, students explore how cultural representations of gender and sexuality in Korea and the Korean diaspora have changed over the twentieth century. Primary sources include literary texts, narrative and documentary films, as well as scholarship on themes and historical context relevant to the materials. We begin by exploring how gendered selfhood in Korea was constructed in relation to the colonial modernization process in the first half of the twentieth century. We then move onto stories of how women and men survived the Cold War, developmentalist, and dictatorial regimes of South Korea from 1945 to 87. In the last segment of the course, we focus our attention to voices from the contemporary moment, to examine how present-day Koreans of various gender and sexual identities contend with the challenges of an increasingly neoliberalizing social order.