Courses

This course explores 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. This is primarily an undergraduate course; graduate students are provided readings in the original language and meet in an additional session to review translations.

This course explores the “fantastic” in premodern Chinese literature from the first millennium BCE up until late imperial China. Chinese authors and readers have long been fascinated by the “fantastic,” including fantastical beasts, ghost stories, and bizarre occurrences. By engaging critically with a selection of masterpieces and examining the historical and cultural specificity of what constitutes the “fantastic,” students learn how fantastic texts problematize the definition of humanity, how the fantastic complicates our understanding of narrative, truth, and epistemology, and how premodern Chinese writers used the fantastic to approach and propose solutions to pressing social issues. 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, representations of the foreign land, the aestheticization of female ghosts, and the use of 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 century. Attention to recent critical studies in transcultural poetic theory. Inspection and discussion of related artifacts in the Beinecke Library and the Yale Art Gallery.

An introduction to modern Chinese literature. Topics include Sinophone studies, East Asian diaspora, theories of comparison, technologies of writing and new literacies, realism, translation, globalization, scientism, and culture.

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.

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. Comparative and creative perspectives are especially welcome, and assignments can accommodate a range of media and presentation formats to suit.

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 term. 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 1987, and South Korea’s integration into the neoliberal world order after democratization. 

This course introduces students to the lasting effects of the Japanese Empire, both on modern Japan and East Asia more broadly. We 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 is 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, 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 course of 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 and developmentalist and dictatorial regimes of South Korea from 1945 to 1987. 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 are contending with the challenges of an increasingly neoliberalizing social order.

A research course in Chinese studies, designed for students with background in modern and literary Chinese. Students explore and evaluate the wealth of primary sources and research tools available in China and in the West. For native speakers of Chinese, introduction to the secondary literature in English and instruction in writing professionally in English on topics about China. Topics include Chinese bibliographies; bibliophiles’ notes; specialized dictionaries; maps and geographical gazetteers; textual editions, variations, and reliability of texts; genealogies and biographical sources; archaeological and visual materials; and major Chinese encyclopedias, compendia, and databases.

Readings in ancient and middle-period Chinese poetry, from the beginnings of the tradition through the Song dynasty.