2008–2009 Asian Studies Courses
First-Year Studies: Cultures and Arts of India
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
The Indian subcontinent hosts numerous cultures grounded in Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, secular, and “tribal” or unassimilated traditions. This interdisciplinary course explores the diverse cultural traditions of India through the visual and performing arts and through selected literature. Fiction and poetic narratives are studied in conjunction with nonverbal arts to illuminate Indian modes of thought and expression. Aesthetic, religious, economic, and political aspects of South Asian arts are viewed in light of transcultural theories of production and consumption. Questions raised in the fall include the following: How do arts of the twenty-first century reflect ancient myths and images? What social agendas underlie the definition of genres and conventional distinctions between “classical” and “folk” arts, and why are such boundaries now widely rejected? Why are cuisine and body decoration included among classical arts in the Indian canon? Which arts were historically available to women? How did British colonial values influence South Asian artists’ identities and self-representations? Hindu temple sculpture, Moghul miniature painting, and Dalit theatre will be studied in light of sectarian histories and social caste practices. In the spring, we explore Indian public culture today. How is the Bollywood film industry, together with other global media, transforming traditional values? How does artistic production reflect patronage, sponsorship, access, and entitlement? How do form and function intersect in rickshaw art and other aspects of daily life? Sources include the music of Ravi Shankar, films of Satyajit Ray and Mira Nair, and work of prominent photographers. The seminar culminates with readings from recent works of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and other postcolonial writers who continue to inscribe images of India onto the global scene.
Chinese History: Tradition and Transformation
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Fall
Historians in both China and the West often depict the premodern Chinese empire as a homogeneous monolith that endured with little change from its inception in the third century B.C.E. until the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century. This course seeks to discover the origins and validity of that depiction. This will involve a close examination of the ways in which China created and conceived of its own history and an exploration of the rise and development of its cultural and political institutions. Topics covered will include the rise and unfolding of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism; the nature of China’s social and cultural practices; the creation of its political and economic systems; and its changing international relations. Class assignments vary, relying mainly on primary sources, including government documents, memoirs, biographies, philosophical texts, and letters.
Performing Identities: Class, Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Contemporary Performance
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
This course will offer students methodologies to think critically about class, ethnicity, gender, and race and the role of performance in reproducing and subverting social constructions of self and other. We will begin by looking at how scholars and political activists have conceptualized class, ethnicity, gender, and race as both historically specific, structured relations of oppression, as well as fields of visual representation. Our discussion will challenge ontological claims about the nature of these social identities, in addition to exploring the ways in which these rubrics of difference intersect and must be thought about in relation to one another. We will apply our theoretical understanding toward examining the underlying assumptions and overt intentions of artists working in a range of performative media, both within popular culture and the avant-garde. We will explore how performances reproduce or subvert ideas about class, ethnicity, gender, and race through the use of stereotypes, drag, humor, irony, and other stylistic choices. Ultimately, our goal in this course will be twofold: to gain an understanding of the limitations and possibilities that contemporary artistic practices have for commenting on social issues and to gain a greater awareness of our own individual responses to performative representations of identity. The course is thus an opportunity for reflecting deeply about ourselves, seeing our experiences and attitudes in relation to broad social constructions and historical trajectories, and, most important, learning how to communicate and discuss our feelings and ideas about controversial subjects in ways that are productive and yet do not seek to hide behind a stifling political correctness. Class work will entail discussions based on readings and audiovisual materials, as well as maintaining a journal. Students will create their own performances as part of their final projects (no previous experience required).
Sacrifice
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
This seminar begins with a study of sacrificial practices associated with Indo-European/Euro-Indian mythologies and ends with a critical inquiry into current legacies and practices. Sacrifice bridges religious, political, and economic aspects of culture. As sacrament, it represents transformational mystery. As ceremonial exchange, it facilitates negotiations of status, observance of boundaries, and the redistribution of goods. In specific cultural settings, sacrifice functions as celebration, as manifestation of goodwill, as insurance, as source of communion. The sacrifice of a scapegoat channels violence and thereby legitimizes acts of killing that serve social interests of surrogacy and catharsis. Seminar topics include gift exchange, fasting and feasting, the warrior ethic, martyrdom, victimization, bloodletting, scarification, asceticism, and renunciation. Liturgies of Hindu puja offerings and of the Roman Catholic Eucharist provide core texts. Sacrificial themes from classical Indian and Hellenistic mythology are traced through contemporary literature and cinema. The seminar addresses the politics of sacrifice and alterity through three case studies: first, sati (widow immolation) in India; second, global representations of charity in Calcutta; and third, the targeting of scapegoats in the current transnational political climate.
Writing India: Transnational Narratives
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Fall
The global visibility of South Asian writers has changed the face of contemporary English literature. Many writers from the Indian subcontinent continue to narrate tumultuous events that surrounded the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan upon independence from British imperial rule. Their writings join utopian imaginings and legacies of the past with dystopias and aspirations of today. This seminar addresses themes of identity, fragmentation, hybridity, memory, and alienation that link South Asian literary production to contemporary writing from settings elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Accounts of communal violence reflect urgencies similar to those expressed in literatures of the Holocaust. The cultural space of India has been repeatedly transformed and redeployed according to varied cultural projects, political interests, and economic agendas. After considering brief accounts of India as represented in ancient chronicles of Chinese, Greek, and Persian travelers, we explore modern constructions of India in excerpts from Kipling, Forster, Orwell, and other writers of the Raj. The central focus of the seminar is on India as remembered and imagined in selected works of writers including Ved Mehta, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Arundhati Roy. We use interdisciplinary critical inquiry as we pursue a literature that shifts increasingly from narrating the nation to narrating its diasporic fragments in transnational contexts.
Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Readings in Daoism: Zhuangzi and His Followers
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Spring
This seminar centers on the careful reading of The Zhuangzi, one of the foundational texts of the Daoist tradition. Arguably the greatest piece of Chinese literature and philosophy, The Zhuangzi, defies all categorization and instead invites readers to probe through its layers of myth, fantasy, jokes, short stories, philosophy, epistemology, social critique, and political commentary. In the end, Zhuangzi plunges us into an examination of some of the core questions of philosophy: What is being? What is knowledge? What is the nature of human nature? The goal of this course is twofold: to understand the Zhuangzi as it was written in the fourth century B.C.E. and to examine the ways in which it has been interpreted and reinterpreted through history. To accomplish the first, we thoroughly familiarize ourselves with the text and the philosophical questions it raises through close and detailed reading. To accomplish the second goal, we will look at the text in its broader historical context as well as its influence on later philosophical and artistic traditions. Readings will include the Dao-de-jing, Confucius, later Daoist philosophers and religious leaders, poets, and painters.
Courses in Related Disciplines
Advanced Japanese
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
This course aims to further develop students’ Japanese proficiency in aural and reading comprehension, in addition to speaking and writing skills. Activities include listening to and discussing television programs and films; writing and performing dialogues and speeches; reading essays, newspaper articles, and short stories; writing a diary, letters, and short essays. Students will also gain experience in using kanji-English dictionaries, as well as other reference dictionaries, as they begin tackling Japanese texts without glosses. Classes will be conducted in Japanese.
Ms. Katz, Fall Semester
Mr. Miller, Spring Semester
Beginning Japanese
Level: Open
Semester: Year
This course is for students with no previous knowledge of Japanese. Students will develop basic communicative skills in listening comprehension and speaking, as well as skills in reading and writing (katakana, hiragana, and basic kanji) in Japanese. While class time and weekly conference meetings will be devoted primarily to language practice, an understanding of Japanese grammar will also be emphasized as an important basis for continued language learning. Class work will be supplemented with weekly group conferences with the instructor. Students will also meet once a week in small groups with a language assistant, a mandatory component of the course.
Beginning. Open to any interested student.
First-Year Studies: Imagination on the Move: Exploring Travel in Literature
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
This first-year studies course will explore the abiding appeal of travel to the literary imagination through different time periods, varying social contexts, and multiple literary forms. Travel has always been an integral part of the literary imagination—from Odysseus’s wandering attempts to journey home to Pico Iyer’s search for the global soul. We will begin our own investigation of travel in literature with the exploration of foreign lands and cultures by writers in the nineteenth century, as well as speculative journeys in the realm of utopian and science fiction literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then we will move on to examine postcolonial and ethnic writing on exile and migration, and return in the mid- to late twentieth century. Finally, we will end by exploring contemporary travelers’ itineraries across a globalizing world.
Ghosts, Monsters, and the Supernatural in Japanese Fiction
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
In this course, we will read translations of Japanese stories ranging from the ninth century to the present that feature ghosts, monsters, and other supernatural elements. We will explore various ways of examining Japanese fiction of the supernatural. For example, how do Edo period (1600-1867) tales of the strange and mysterious (kaidan) link urban centers with the countryside? What is the relationship between orally transmitted tales and written texts? We will consider both literary and psychoanalytical theories to help us analyze the boundaries between life and death, human and nonhuman, female and male, and the limits of time and space in these narratives. Readings include works by Ueda Akinari, Izumi Kyo_ka, Lafcadio Hearn, Akutagawa Ryu_nosuke, Edogawa Rampo, Enchi Fumiko, Abe Kobo, Murakami Haruki, among others. Several Japanese films will complement our reading of these texts.
In World Time: Cultural Studies of the Pacific Rim
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Year
This course offers an introduction to contemporary literature and film of the Pacific Rim within the framework of interdisciplinary and inter-Asian cultural studies. We will examine how various writers and filmmakers participate in the project of global decolonization, and in so doing, we will try to make good on the “missed opportunity to make the study of a specific area part of the general learning of the world” (Harootunian and Miyoshi). Prominent questions will include the following: How do our perception of the aesthetic qualities of a particular literary or cinematic work function in the multinational context of spectatorship? How do different writers and filmmakers address shared, though not identical, relationships to multinational historical events, such as Japanese imperialism or the Vietnam War? How do issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality manifest in different contexts? How do we trace relationships existing between different locations within the Asia-Pacific region in particular works of art? How do discourses of nationalism, nativism, and civilizationalism contend with attempts to imagine transnational collectivities?
Intermediate Japanese
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
This course is designed for students who have completed Beginning Japanese or its equivalent. Students will continue to develop their skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing while expanding their vocabulary and knowledge of grammar. At the end of the course, students should be able to handle simple communicative tasks and situations effectively, understand simple daily conversations, write short essays, read simple essays, and discuss their content. Class work will be supplemented with weekly group conferences with the instructor. Students will also meet once a week in small groups with a language assistant, a mandatory component of the course.
Reading O_ e Kenzaburo and Murakami Haruki
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
In this course, we will read English translations of the two most famous contemporary Japanese writers, _Oe Kenzaburo (b. 1935) and Murakami Haruki (b. 1949). These two serve as symbols of competing trends in contemporary Japanese literature: “pure” (serious) literature versus popular literature. _Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994, for creating “an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.” On the other hand, Murakami’s fiction, which _Oe has criticized as “pop,” has been described as “youthful, slangy, political, and allegorical” and seamlessly blends the mundane with surrealistic elements. We will consider not only the differences between these two writers, but also the similar themes in their works (social outcasts, alienation, search for identity, memory and history, legend and storytelling). Our readings will include novels, short stories, nonfiction, and other essays.