Asian Studies

First-Year Studies—Year | 10 credits

ASIA 1022

In 1902, China’s leading intellectual and political theorist, Liang Qichao, observed, “If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction.” In the century that followed, reformers, radicals, and regimes repeatedly placed fiction at the center of the national project of modernity. Exploring literature’s contribution to the construction of the Chinese national body, this yearlong seminar uses short stories and novels as windows on a cataclysmic century filled with wars, political revolutions, cultural change, and social upheaval. As writers participated in and commented on these traumatic events, fiction was a key battleground for political, social, and cultural change. In fall, we will encounter short stories and novels that carried forward radical demolitions of the Confucian cultural tradition and political critiques in the first half of the century. Beginning in the 1920s, urban feminists wrote to promote the emancipation of the individual, while a decade later leftist writers exposed the evils of Western imperialism and capitalist exploitation. How did these works contribute to revolutionary movements? Despite an overall focus on the political dimension, we will take time out to consider some more lyrically inclined writers who explored China’s ethnic margins and the more private dramas of love and despair. In spring, we will delve into the socialist realism of Communist fiction to identify its unique qualities and role in Maoist political life before turning to the literary reassessments of Maoist excesses in the reform era (1980s) and the place of literature in the neoliberal atmosphere of post-Tiananmen (1989) China. We will interrogate fictional works in postrevolutionary China for how they deal with and understand China’s revolutionary past, its ragged cultural tradition, and a rapidly changing society and economy. What is the relationship between art and politics in these ostensibly (even studiously) apolitical works? And finally, we will also cover Taiwanese literature from the 1960s-1990s, as it, too, grappled with economic development, its political basis, and social effects. Readings will include many of the great characters in early 20th-century literature, such as Lu Xun’s cannibalistic madman and hapless Ah Q, Ding Ling’s tubercular Miss Sophie, Shen Congwen’s Hmong villagers, and Zhang Ailing’s college student turned mistress-assassin. We will also meet blood-drenched bandits, long-suffering peasants, and disaffected urban youths in an age of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. No prior knowledge of China (history or literature) is required. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for group conferences and biweekly for individual conferences. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

First-Year Studies—Year | 10 credits

ASIA 1030

This course will look at the rise and unfolding of China’s major religious traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and popular (folk) religion—and seeks to place them within a broader historical, social, and cultural context. In doing so, we will take a two-pronged approach. The first approach will involve the close reading of texts that were foundational in each of the traditions. Topics to be explored will include: notions of the Dao (Tao) and the ways in which it might be attained by individuals, families, and communities; the essence of the mind, human nature, and the emotions and the ways in which they interact in behavior; and practices of inner self-cultivation and social engagement. The second approach will be to explore the specific religious practices associated with each of the traditions (e.g., ancestor worship, exorcisms, community worship, and prayers), the origins and transformation of popular religious festivals (including New Years, All Souls Day, and Hell), and the rise and spread of deity cults (including Guanyin, Mazu, and City Gods). This will involve a different set of texts, including ritual and liturgical texts, temple records and regulations, “how-to” manuals for specific practices, miracle tales, temple performance pieces, government documents, legal cases, diaries, and journals. In bringing these two approaches together, we will consider the ways in which religious traditions and practices both shaped and were shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political institutions. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences. 

Faculty

• Ellen Neskar

Open, Lecture—Fall | 5 credits

ASIA 2031

Note: Same as HIST 2031.

In January 2018, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the hands of the Doomsday Clock (yes, it’s a thing) at two minutes to midnight, the nearest it has been to catastrophe since 1953. In late 2019, Putin announced that Russia had developed “invincible” hypersonic nuclear missiles capable of hitting virtually anywhere on the globe. The conflict in Ukraine harbors nuclear nightmares that haunt our world again. With world leaders flirting with the prospect of nuclear holocaust, an understanding of the only instance of nuclear warfare is again relevant, even crucial. Through a rich variety of sources (textual, visual, and cinematic), this lecture-seminar hybrid will examine, from three major perspectives, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. First, reading scholarship and primary documents, we will look at the decision to drop the bombs, as well as the postwar claims justifying them. We will interrogate the American narrative that the bombings were militarily necessary and the assumption that they ended the war while also putting them into the historical context of World War II—specifically, strategic bombing of non-military targets, prospects of Japanese surrender in the final months of the conflict, and the looming Cold War with Russia. Second, we will confront the effects of the bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and their populations. Technical descriptions and firsthand accounts will help us grasp the unique destructiveness of the atomic bombs on both bodies and buildings, as well as how people coped with that destructiveness. The diary of Michihiko Hachiya, for example, will reveal a medical doctor’s observations on the breakdown of society and how ordinary Japanese dealt with the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. Finally, the course will examine the impact of the bombs on Japan’s postwar culture, including the profound sense of victimization that they imparted, which has complicated Japanese narratives about World War II and inspired an abiding pacifism in Japanese society. In a different vein, serious literature written by survivors will open up the relevance of atomic narratives by exploring the social alienation endured by the hibakusha (bomb survivors) in postwar Japan. Shōmei Tōmatsu’s photography of Nagasaki and its hibakusha will provide a visual window on the bombs’ legacy, as well. We will also examine some popular culture—the original (1954) Godzilla (Gojirō) movie and some anime or manga—for the ways the bombs were appropriated and invoked in apocalyptic imagery, imagery that expressed a distinctive understanding of the dark side of science and technology and made a lasting contribution to wider global culture. This course will consist of weekly lectures paired with weekly seminars for close discussion of our readings.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ASIA 3351

This course will center on the close, detailed reading of a small number of foundational texts in classical Confucianism and Taoism. Our focus will be to explore how these texts might fit “virtue ethics,” which emphasizes moral character and the pursuit of a worthwhile life. Some attention will be paid to other forms of ethics, including those that stress either the adherence to duties and obligations or the social consequences of ethical action. The primary goal, however, will be to examine the ways in which classical Chinese philosophers regarded personal virtues and “good character” as both a prerequisite to and an explanation of appropriate action and its consequences. Among the more specific topics to be explored include: ideal traits of virtue, the links between moral values and different understandings of human nature, the psychological structures of virtue, practices leading to the cultivation of virtue, the roles of family and friendship in developing moral values, and what constitutes a good life. 

Faculty

• Ellen Neskar

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

ASIA 3018

Note: Same as HIST 3018.

In 1902, China’s leading intellectual and political theorist, Liang Qichao, observed, “If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction.” In the century that followed, reformers, radicals, and regimes repeatedly placed fiction at the center of the national project of modernity. Exploring literature’s contribution to the construction of the Chinese national body, this yearlong seminar uses short stories and novels as windows on a cataclysmic century filled with wars, political revolutions, cultural change, and social upheaval. As writers participated in and commented on these traumatic events, fiction was a key battleground for political, social, and cultural change. In fall, we will encounter short stories and novels that carried forward radical demolitions of the Confucian cultural tradition and political critiques in the first half of the century. Beginning in the 1920s, urban feminists wrote to promote the emancipation of the individual, while a decade later leftist writers exposed the evils of Western imperialism and capitalist exploitation. How did these works contribute to revolutionary movements? Despite an overall focus on the political dimension, we will take time out to consider some more lyrically inclined writers who explored China’s ethnic margins and the more private dramas of love and despair. In spring, we will delve into the socialist realism of communist fiction to identify its unique qualities and role in Maoist political life before turning to the literary reassessments of Maoist excesses in the reform era (1980s) and the place of literature in the neoliberal atmosphere of post-Tiananmen (1989) China. We will interrogate fictional works in postrevolutionary China for how they deal with and understand China’s revolutionary past, its ragged cultural tradition, and a rapidly changing society and economy. What is the relationship between art and politics in these ostensibly (even studiously) apolitical works? And finally, we will also cover Taiwanese literature from the 1960s to the 1990s, as it, too, grappled with economic development, its political basis, and social effects. Our readings include many of the great characters in early 20th-century literature, such as Lu Xun’s cannibalistic madman and hapless Ah Q, Ding Ling’s tubercular Miss Sophie, Shen Congwen’s Hmong villagers, and Zhang Ailing’s college student turned mistress-assassin. We will also meet blood-drenched bandits, long-suffering peasants, and disaffected urban youths in an age of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. No prior knowledge of China (history or literature) is required.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

ASIA 3075

This course will look at the rise and unfolding of China’s major religious traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and popular (folk) religion—and seeks to place them within a broader historical, social, and cultural context. In doing so, we will take a two-pronged approach. The first approach will involve the close reading of texts that were foundational in each of the traditions. Topics to be explored will include: notions of the Dao (Tao) and the ways in which it might be attained by individuals, families, and communities; the essence of the mind, human nature, and the emotions and the ways in which they interact in behavior; and practices of inner self-cultivation and social engagement. The second approach will be to explore the specific religious practices associated with each of the traditions (e.g., ancestor worship, exorcisms, community worship, and prayers), the origins and transformation of popular religious festivals (including New Years, All Souls Day, and Hell), and the rise and spread of deity cults (including Guanyin, Mazu, and City Gods). This will involve a different set of texts, including ritual and liturgical texts, temple records and regulations, “how-to” manuals for specific practices, miracle tales, temple performance pieces, government documents, legal cases, diaries, and journals. In bringing these two approaches together, we will consider the ways in which religious traditions and practices both shaped and were shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political institutions.

Faculty

• Ellen Neskar

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ASIA 3005

This seminar will explore the realm of private life and individual identity and their relationship to the historical events and changes taking place in modern China from late Qing (1644-1911) up into the Reform era (2000s). Investigations will cover an eclectic mix of “personal” writings: diaries, letters, memoirs, oral testimony, autobiographies, third-party anthropological reconstructions of individuals, and (auto)biographical fiction. Among others, we will encounter late imperial Confucian radicals and mystics, petty literati, young urban women and their mothers with bound feet, peasants, radical revolutionaries, intellectuals, Maoist Red Guards, and factory workers. These personal narratives not only open up windows on the lives and times of their writers but also allow us to investigate the intersection between the practice of writing and identity construction in modern China. Primary readings will be contextualized with historical scholarship and supplemented with selections from some important theorists (Benedict Anderson, Anthony Giddens, and René Girard) that provide interdisciplinary analytical tools to explore the construction of personal identity and the self. We will ask how the personal narrative writers present themselves: What are their self-conceptions and self-deceptions? Where does their sense of “self” come from, and how do they construct private selves through writing? We should even dare to ask whether these categories of “private” and “self” are relevant. The rapid, often traumatic, changes of modern China will cause us to consider how these people understood and situated themselves in wider society and the events of their time and, thus, will raise questions about the imaginative constructions of national (or social) communities that are smuggled inside these “personal” stories.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ASIA 3306

This course will offer a three-part approach to the study of law in premodern China, focusing on legal theory, courts and the implementation of law, and the relationship between law and popular culture. The first part of the course will provide an overview of the philosophical basis of law, the state’s development of civil and penal law codes, and its creation of courts and judicial institutions. The second part will look more closely at the application of the law code to criminal cases in the medieval period. Here, we will study case books and judicial judgments, precedent texts, magistrates’ manuals, forensic guidelines, and journal accounts. Topics that we will examine include: the role and function of local judges, the processes by which penal cases were judged and punishments determined, and the rights and obligations of the various parties in a legal suit. The third part of the course will examine the ways in which the judicial system both influenced and was influenced by popular culture. Our readings will include religious tracts, folktales, and popular fiction. Topics will include the ways in which the court system shaped popular notions of justice, karma, and revenge; the contribution of the legal system to increasingly complicated notions of heaven and hell; and the rise of popular “detective” fiction centered on the courtroom and judges.

Faculty

• Ellen Neskar