Courses

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.

No knowledge of Japanese required. A previous college-level course in the study of literary texts is recommended but not required.

Exploration of East Asian literature, film, culture, and history through examination of the genre of “crime” or “detective” fiction. Topics include genre theory, as well as a variety of traveling themes in modernity, such as sexuality, surveillance, colonialism, scientific rationality, perversion, the urban, debt, violence, and transnational cultural flows.

This course explores how Japanese literature, cinema, and popular culture have engaged with questions of environment, ecology, pollution, and climate change from the wake of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 to the ongoing Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in the present. Environmental disasters and the slow violence of their aftermath have had an enormous impact on Japanese cultural production, and we examine how these cultural forms seek to negotiate and work through questions of representing the unrepresentable, victimhood and survival, trauma and national memory, uneven development and discrimination, the human and the nonhuman, and climate change’s impact on imagining the future. Special attention is given to the possibilities and limitations of different forms—the novel, poetry, film, manga, anime—that Japanese writers and artists have to think about humans’ relationship with our environment.

It is said that the study of literature, unlike other disciplines, has the power to inspire and hone our capacity to feel for others. It trains us by putting us in hypothetical, affectively compelling but controlled worlds where we can experience, reflect, and analyze how we respond to those around us. This seminar tests that view by drawing on literary, social, archival, and theoretical texts, as well as modern accounts of atrocities and disasters in Western and non-Western contexts. Readings include Adam Smith, Lu Xun, Charles Darwin, Carlo Ginzburg, Mo Yan, Samantha Powers, Tokushi Kasahara, Yang Jisheng, Hannah Arendt, and Raul Hilberg.

Prior knowledge of Japanese is not required; readings are in English.

Close analytical reading of a selection of texts from the Nara through the Tokugawa periods: prose, poetry, and various genres. Introduction to kanbun.

After JAPN 170 or equivalent.

Close analytical reading of a selection of texts from the Nara through the Tokugawa periods: prose, poetry, and various genres. Introduction to kanbun.

After JAPN 170 or equivalent.

This colloquium deals with special topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. It combines and encourages different empirical and theoretical approaches to cultural studies, intellectual history, and other comparative topics. We examine a range of materials, such as fiction, biographies, plays, manuals, official documents, journals, political and philosophical treatises, and different visual media, in addition to the appropriate scholarship. The topic for 2014–15 is science and civilization.

Close reading of a wide range of prose, poetry, and drama from the Edo period (1600–1868), supplemented with relevant secondary scholarship; introduction to the reading of original materials in cursive calligraphic style (kuzushiji).