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East Asian Languages & Civilizations
Japanese
Korean

East Asian Languages and Civilizations Courses

The courses listed below are open to students in the College, regardless of level, subject to the consent of the instructor where indicated. East Asian linguistic knowledge is not required for nonlanguage courses unless indicated. Transfer students who wish to enroll in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean language courses beyond the first-year level must take the placement examination offered during Orientation Week in late September. Over the summer, information that describes these tests is sent to all incoming students, or students may contact Lewis Fortner, HM 286, 702-8613.

Chinese

108-109-110. Elementary Modern Chinese I, II, III. This course sequence fulfills the Common Core foreign language requirement. Must be taken for a letter grade. No auditors permitted. This course introduces the fundamentals of modern Chinese. Listening, speaking, reading, and writing are equally emphasized. Accurate pronunciation is also stressed. The class meets for five eighty-minute periods a week for "true beginners," and five fifty-minute periods a week for "partial beginners." ("Partial beginners" are those who can speak Mandarin fluently with or without dialectal accent, but do not know how to read and write Chinese.) C. Chao, Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

208-209-210. Intermediate Modern Chinese I, II, III. PQ: Chin 110 or consent of instructor. No P/N or P/F grades are permitted. No auditors permitted. Class sessions, conducted in Chinese, emphasize drills and the discussion of readings in a variety of source materials, including contemporary Chinese short stories, lectures, newspapers, and some original academic articles, supplemented by sessions with video material. Simplified characters and cursive script are also introduced. The class meets for five eighty-minute periods a week. C. Chao, C. Borchert. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

211-212-213. Elementary Literary Chinese I, II, III. PQ: Chin 210 or consent of instructor. This course provides an introduction to the grammatical foundations of the classical language or wenyan. It includes supplementary readings from Mencius, Zhuangzi, Sima Qian's Records of the Historian, and other texts. E. Shaughnessy, Autumn; E. Møllgaard, Winter, Spring.

255. The Chinese Classics. This course fulfills the third quarter of the East Asian civilization sequence. This course focuses on the three most important texts of the Chinese classical tradition: the Yijing or Book of Changes, the Shangshu or Book of Documents, and the Shijing or Book of Poetry. We examine each of these three texts in four different historical contexts: their original composition (ca. 1000 B.C.), the first attempts at interpretation (ca. 500 B.C.), incorporation into the Confucian canon (ca. 100 B.C.), and modern interpretation. E. Shaughnessy. Spring.

279. Civilization and Peasant Society (=EALC 279, Hist 296). PQ: Chin 108-109-110 or equivalent, or consent of instructor. We think of the cultured elites of imperial China and peasants as inhabiting separate worlds. Yet the peasants who sustained the superstructure came into contact with the elites in a myriad of ways. In this course, we try to create a dialogue between the two worlds and to problematize the issue of "the unity of Chinese culture." We study elite and popular understandings of such phenomena as the state, commerce, religion, kinship, nation, and the "people" in late traditional and revolutionary China. P. Duara. Winter.

290-291. History of Modern China, 1600 to the Present (=Hist 290-291). This two-quarter lecture course presents the main intellectual, political, economic, and social trends in China from 1600 to the present. It includes study of the ideological and organizational structures, and the social movements, that define a process variously described in Western literature as modernization, reform and revolution, or political development. The emphasis is on institutional and intellectual developments during this period, especially in the twentieth century. Some attention is paid to historiographic analysis and criticism. All readings in the English-language secondary literature. G. Alitto. Autumn, Winter.

308-309-310. Advanced Modern Chinese I, II, III. PQ: Chin 210 or consent of instructor. This course emphasizes drills for more advanced sentence structures and requires discussions in Chinese on academic and scholarly subject matter. It provides exercises designed to increase reading comprehension and the ability to translate accurately original Chinese source materials, ranging over various topics, authors, and styles; to broaden students' experience; and to enhance their capacity for independent study. F. Cai. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

375. Western Views of Early China. In this course we survey scholarship on early China (Shang through Han) as it has developed in the West. Equal focus is given to China and its Western interpreters. Developments in art, archaeology, history, language, religion, philosophy, and technology are all considered. All readings in English. E. Shaughnessy. Autumn.

395. Western Philosophy/Chinese Thought. PQ: Consent of instructor. What is philosophy? What is thought? Why is there resistance to accepting Chinese thought as philosophy? Are the Chinese thinkers committed to reason or do they propose a quasi-philosophical way of life? What role do perfectionism, therapeutic arguments, and rhetoric play in Chinese thought? Can the fragment (a saying by Confucius or Laozi) be just as philosophical as systematic philosophy? In this course we consider these and related issues. We read works of philosophy/thought from both the Western and the Chinese tradition and discuss some attempts to draw Chinese thought within the horizon of Western philosophy. E. Møllgaard. Spring.

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408-409-410. Fourth-Year Rapid Readings and Discussion I, II, III. PQ: Chin 310 or equivalent and consent of instructor. C. Borchert. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

458. Song Lyrics. PQ: Knowledge of literary Chinese. This course offers an intensive study and reading of selected medieval Chinese lyrics. Students read and analyze ten to fifteen major poets and a variety of the most popular meters, together with selected works of traditional Chinese criticism and Western scholarship. A. Yu. Autumn.

East Asian Languages and Civilizations

108-109-110. Introduction to the Civilizations of East Asia I, II, III (=Hist 151-152-153, SocSci 235-236-237). PQ: Must be taken in sequence. This course sequence fulfills the Common Core requirement in civilizational studies. This is a three-quarter sequence on the civilizations of China, Japan, and Korea. We emphasize major transformations in these cultures and societies within the premodern period and as shown by various forms of modernization during the past century and a half. P. Duara, Autumn; T. Najita, Winter; Staff, Spring.

261. Art of the East: China (=ArtH 161). PQ: Students must attend the first class to confirm enrollment. This course surveys Chinese art and architecture from prehistory to the recent avant-garde. Though the introduction follows a chronological order, it is also thematically motivated. We see how visual artifacts--paintings, sculptures, and architectural monuments--both consciously encode different pragmatic agendas and circumstantial exigencies and unconsciously betray cultural anxieties and tensions. The purpose is to enable students to look at Chinese history in visual terms and to view visual objects in historical terms, with a critique of the perception of Oriental art as static and suspended in a timeless vacuum. Y. Wang. Spring.

270. Fifty Years Later: The Asia-Pacific War and Japanese Literature. In this course we reflect on the legacy of remembering and forgetting that characterizes postwar Japan, a period punctuated by declarations of its end. Recent developments--the end of the Cold War, the revelations concerning the so-called military comfort women, the controversy over the atomic bomb exhibit at the Smithsonian--suggest that there is much unfinished business on both sides of the Pacific vis-à-vis the Asia-Pacific War. We study a number of literary texts with care for both their historical context and our own moment. Even the canonical works (e.g., Ooka Shohei's Fires on the Plain) and major topics--first and foremost the atomic bombs--should look different in an age when we are acutely mindful of the pervasive historical legacy of colonialism and the ways in which gender, class, race, and ethnicity structure society. N. Field. Autumn.

297-298-299. Senior Tutorial I, II, III. PQ: Consent of instructor and EALC director of undergraduate studies. Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

312. Introduction to Religions of China and Japan (=DivHR 301). A. Yu. Winter.

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Japanese

111-112-113. Elementary Modern Japanese I, II, III. This sequence fulfills the Common Core foreign language requirement. Students should plan to continue their language study through at least the second-year level to make their skills practical. Must be taken for a letter grade. This is the first year of a three-year program designed to provide students with a thorough grounding in modern Japanese. Grammar, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary are learned through oral work, reading, and writing in and outside of class. Daily practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing is crucial. The class meets for five fifty-minute periods a week. No auditors are permitted. Y. Hirata, H. Lory, A. Nelson, Y. Uchida. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

211-212-213. Intermediate Modern Japanese I, II, III. PQ: Japan 113 or equivalent and consent of instructor. Must be taken for a letter grade. Continuation of the elementary course. The emphasis on spoken language in the first half of the course gradually shifts toward reading and writing in the latter half. The class is conducted almost entirely in Japanese. The class meets for five fifty-minute periods a week. No auditors are permitted. H. Noto, Autumn; Y. Uchida, A. Nelson, Winter, Spring.

293. Politics and Culture in Early Modern Japan (=Hist 293). An intermediate-level survey of the history of the old Tokugawa Era, 1600-1868. T. Najita. Autumn.

294. Ideologies of Modernism in Japan, 1900 to the Present (=Hist 294). H. Harootunian. Winter.

311-312-313. Advanced Modern Japanese I, II, III. PQ: Japan 213 or equivalent or consent of instructor. The third year marks the end of the basic modern language study. The purpose of the course, which is conducted in Japanese, is to help students become able to understand authentic written and spoken materials with reasonable ease. The texts are all authentic materials with some study aids. The class meets for three ninety-minute periods a week. Staff, Autumn; H. Lory, Winter; Y. Uchida, Spring.

347. Premodern Japanese: Kobun. PQ: Japan 313 or equivalent or consent of instructor. An introduction to classical grammar. W. Sibley. Autumn.

348-349. Premodern Japanese: Kindai Bungo I and II. PQ: Japan 313 or equivalent or consent of instructor. Readings are from historical materials written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. H. Noto. Winter, Spring.

411-412-413. Fourth-Year Rapid Reading of Modern Texts I, II, III. PQ: Japan 313 or equivalent or consent of instructor. These courses are designed for students who have completed the three-year program of Japanese language training and are prepared to begin the study of texts from various areas of specialized research, as well as literary selections. W. Sibley, Autumn; N. Field, Winter; H. Lory, Spring.

423. Cities and Country in Japanese Culture. PQ: Consent of instructor. This course explores representations of life in the cities (Edo/Tokyo and Osaka-Kyoto) and country life in early modern to contemporary Japanese fiction, poetry, visual art, and film. Theoretical and critical readings include works by Maeda Ai, Karatani Kojin, Raymond Williams, and Roland Barthes. Most primary readings are in English. (Some of the theoretical readings are in Japanese only, but this does not exclude nonreaders of Japanese.) W. Sibley. Winter.

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Korean

111-112-113. Introduction to the Korean Language I, II, III. This course sequence fulfills the Common Core foreign language requirement. The first year is devoted to acquiring the basic skills for speaking and listening comprehension and the beginnings of literacy through reading and writing. In addition to the Korean script, some of the most commonly used Chinese characters are introduced. Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

211-212-213. Intermediate Korean I, II, III. PQ: Korean 113 or equivalent and consent of instructor. The goals of this course include the comprehension and production of more complex spoken constructions and an ability to read somewhat complex materials. Videotapes are used in a supplementary fashion and enough new Chinese characters are introduced for the achievement of basic literacy. J.-H. Shim. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

311-312-313. Advanced Korean I, II, III. PQ: Korean 213 or equivalent and consent of instructor. Along with continued work on spoken Korean, the emphasis shifts to readings in a wide selection of written styles, including journalistic pieces, college-level textbooks, and literary prose. An effort is made to accommodate the specialized interests of individual students. Also, some audio and videotapes are used. Students are expected to increase their knowledge of Chinese characters to a total of roughly nine hundred. Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

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