East Asian Languages and Cultures (EA LANG)
EA LANG 24 Freshman Seminar 1 Unit
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall and spring
Grading: The grading option will be decided by the instructor when the class is offered.
Hours and format: 1 hour of seminar per week for 15 weeks. 1.5 hours of seminar per week for 10 weeks. 2 hours of seminar per week for 8 weeks. 3 hours of seminar per week for 6 weeks. 3 hours of seminar per week for 5 weeks.
The Freshman Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small seminar setting. Freshman seminars are offered in all campus departments and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to fifteen freshmen.
Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
EA LANG C50/BUDDSTD C50/S,SEASN C52 Introduction to the Study of Buddhism 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages; East Asian Languages and Cultures; Group in Buddhist Studies; South and Southeast Asian Studies
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Lecture and 1 hour of Discussion per week for 15 weeks. 8 hours of Lecture and 2 hours of Discussion per week for 6 weeks.
This introduction to the study of Buddhism will consider materials drawn from various Buddhist traditions of Asia, from ancient times down to the present day. However, the course is not intended to be a comprehensive or systematic survey; rather than aiming at breadth, the course is designed around key themes such as ritual, image veneration, mysticism, meditation, and death. The overarching emphasis throughout the course will be on the hermeneutic difficulties attendant upon the study of religion in general, and Buddhism in particular.
EA LANG 84 Sophomore Seminar 1 or 2 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: The grading option will be decided by the instructor when the class is offered.
Hours and format: 1 hour of seminar per week per unit for 15 weeks. 1 and 1 half hours of seminar per week per unit for 10 weeks. 2 hours of seminar per week per unit for 8 weeks. 3 hours of seminar per week per unit for 5 weeks.
Prerequisites: At discretion of instructor.
Sophomore seminars are small interactive courses offered by faculty members in departments all across the campus. Sophomore seminars offer opportunity for close, regular intellectual contact between faculty members and students in the crucial second year. The topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to 15 sophomores.
Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
EA LANG 101 Catastrophe, Memory, and Narrative: Comparative Responses to Atrocity in the Twentieth Century 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Lecture and 1 hour of Discussion per week for 15 weeks. 8 hours of Lecture and 2 hours of Discussion per week for 6 weeks.
This course will examine Japanese, Jewish, and African responses to and representations of violent conflict. We will pay attention to how catastrophic events are productive of new forms of expression--oral, written, and visual--as well as destructive of familiar ones. We will examine the ways in which experience and its representation interact during and in the aftermath of extreme violence. Our empirical cases will be drawn from our research on comparative Japanese and Jewish responses to WWII atrocities, and on the post-Cold War civil wars in Africa.
Instructor: Tansman
EA LANG 103 Writing, Visuality, and the Powers of Images 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall and spring
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Lecture per week for 15 weeks.
This course examines how fictional and historical texts from Asia and the West explore beliefs in the powers of images and their implication in questions of knowledge and power, the borders of life and death, and the politics of gender, history, memory, and culture. We'll track how such beliefs change, persist, and are re-appropriated across historical time and cultural space, and consider the critical light "premodern" texts from our "modern" world of images project upon each other.
EA LANG 105 Dynamics of Romantic Core Values in East Asian Premodern Literature and Contemporary Film 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Lecture per week for 15 weeks. 8 hours of Lecture per week for 6 weeks.
This course explores the representation of romantic love in East Asian cultures in both premodern and post-modern contexts. Students develop a better understanding of the similarities and differences in traditional values in three East Asian cultures by comparing how canonical texts of premodern China, Japan and Korea represent romantic relationship. They explore how these values sometimes provide a given framework for a narrative and sometimes provide the definition of transgressive acts. This is followed by the study of several contemporary East Asian films, giving the student the opportunity to explore how traditional values persist, change, or become nexus points of resistance in the complicated modern and post-modern milieu of East Asian cultures maintaining a national identity while exercising an international presence.
Instructor: Wallace
EA LANG 106 Expressing the Ineffable in China and Beyond: The Making of Meaning in Poetic Writing 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall and spring
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Lecture per week for 15 weeks.
This course will explore how the Chinese and English-language literary traditions (broadly defined) delineate the realm of the ineffable, and how cultural notions of the inexpressible shape the writing and reading of poems, songs, and a selection of prose pieces, from the uses of figurative language and prosody to genre and canon formation. In addition, in order to deepen our understanding of how writing achieves its aims, some attention will be given to nonverbal modes of expression, including calligraphy and painting--and attempts to render them in writing. Over this course of study, students will not only refine their sensitivity to the power of artistic modes of indirection, but will also hone their skills in close reading, analytical writing, and oral expression. All readings will be in English.
Instructor: Varsano
EA LANG 107 War, Empire, and Literature in East Asia 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall and spring
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Lecture per week for 15 weeks.
This course will examine war, empire, and the writing and memorialization of history through an eclectic group of literary, graphic, and cinematic texts from China, Japan, Europe, and the U.S. We will begin by examining crucial issues of imperial power, violence, and historical representation through the lens of the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian's classic accounts of "terrorism" in the Warring States period, the rise of the Han empire, and its conflicts with the Hsiung-nu "barbarians" to the north. With these earlier examples in mind, we will turn our focus to two crucial conflicts in modern history - the Boxer Uprising of 1899-1900, and the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 - and their diverse representations in a number of different times, places, and media.
Instructor: Jones
EA LANG 109 History of the Culture of Tea in China and Japan 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Lecture per week for 15 weeks. 8 hours of Lecture per week for 6 weeks.
The course takes the traditions of tea in China and Japan as a way of viewing cultural similarities and differences between the two countries. It explores aesthetic, religious, and social aspects of China and Japan by showing how religion, philosophy, and the arts stimulated and were stimulated by the practice of the consumption of tea in social and ritualized contexts. Understanding the tea culture of these countries informs students of important and enduring aspects of both cultures, provides an opportunity to discuss the role of religion and art in social practice (and vice versa), provides a forum for cultural comparison and provides as well an example of the relationship between the two countries and Japanese methods of importing and naturalizing another country's social practice.
Instructor: Wallace
EA LANG 110 Bio-Ethical Issues in East Asian Thought 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of lecture per week. 8 hours of lecture per week for 6 weeks.
This course will explore some of the most difficult bioethical issues confronting the world today from the perspective of traditional values embedded in the cultural history of India, China, and Japan as evidenced in their religions, legal codes, and political history. Possible topics include population control, abortion, sex-selection, euthanasia, suicide, genetic manipulation, brain-death, and organ transplants.
Instructor: Blum
EA LANG 112 The East Asian Sixties 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of lecture per week. 8 hours of lecture per week for 6 weeks.
The 1960s were a time of historical transformation and upheaval in East Asia. It saw the overthrow of political regimes, the consolidation of communism, unprecedented capitalist expansion, and the emergence of new technologies that affected aesthetic production and consumption. This course explores the multiple aspects of culture, aesthetics, and politics that defined this moment. It asks how and why we can define the 1960s as a period, while considering the significance of defining East Asia (a term which denotes an imagined space of relations) as a particular region at this time.
Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
EA LANG C120/BUDDSTD C120 Buddhism on the Silk Road 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages; East Asian Languages and Cultures; Group in Buddhist Studies
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Lecture per week for 15 weeks. 8 hours of Lecture per week for 6 weeks.
This course will discuss the social, economic, and cultural aspects of Buddhism as it moved along the ancient Eurasian trading network referred to as the “Silk Road”. Instead of relying solely on textual sources, the course will focus on material culture as it offers evidence concerning the spread of Buddhism. Through an examination of the Buddhist archaeological remains of the Silk Road, the course will address specific topics, such as the symbiotic relationship between Buddhism and commerce; doctrinal divergence; ideological shifts in the iconography of the Buddha; patronage (royal, religious and lay); Buddhism and political power; and art and conversion. All readings will be in English.
EA LANG C126/BUDDSTD C126 Buddhism and the Environment 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages; East Asian Languages and Cultures; Group in Buddhist Studies
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall and spring
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Lecture per week for 15 weeks.
Prerequisites: One lower-division course in Buddhist Studies or consent of instructor.
A thematic course on Buddhist perspectives on nature and Buddhist responses to environmental issues. The first half of the course focuses on East Asian Buddhist cosmological and doctrinal perspectives on the place of the human in nature and the relationship between the salvific goals of Buddhism and nature. The second half of the course examines Buddhist ethics, economics, and activism in relation to environmental issues in contemporary Southeast Asia, East Asia, and America.
EA LANG C128/BUDDSTD C128/S,SEASN C145 Buddhism in Contemporary Society 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages; East Asian Languages and Cultures; Group in Buddhist Studies; South and Southeast Asian Studies
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall and spring
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week.
A study of the Buddhist tradition as it is found today in Asia. The course will focus on specific living traditions of East, South, and/or Southeast Asia. Themes to be addressed may include contemporary Buddhist ritual practices; funerary and mortuary customs; the relationship between Buddhism and other local religious traditions; the relationship between Buddhist institutions and the state; Buddhist monasticism and its relationship to the laity; Buddhist ethics; Buddhist "modernism," and so on.
Instructor: von Rospatt
EA LANG C130/BUDDSTD C130 Zen Buddhism 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages; East Asian Languages and Cultures; Group in Buddhist Studies
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Lecture and 1 hour of Discussion per week for 15 weeks. 8 hours of Lecture and 2 hours of Discussion per week for 6 weeks.
Prerequisites: One lower division course in Asian religion recommended.
This course will introduce students to the Zen Buddhist traditions of China and Japan, drawing on a variety of disciplinary perspectives (history, anthropology, philosophy, and so on). The course will also explore a range of hermeneutic problems (problems involved in interpretation) entailed in understanding a sophisticated religious tradition that emerged in a time and culture very different from our own.
Instructor: Sharf
EA LANG C132/BUDDSTD C132 Pure Land Buddhism 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages; East Asian Languages and Cultures; Group in Buddhist Studies
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of lecture per week. 8 hours of lecture per week for 6 weeks.
This course will discuss the historical development of the Pure Land school of East Asian Buddhism, the largest form of Buddhism practiced today in China and Japan. The curriculum is divided into India, China, and Japan sections, with the second half of the course focusing exclusively on Japan where this form of religious culture blossomed most dramatically, covering the ancient, medieval, and modern periods. The curriculum will begin with a reading of the core scriptures that form the basis of the belief system and then move into areas of cultural expression. The course will follow two basic trajectories over the centuries: doctrine/philosophy and culture/society.
Instructor: Blum
EA LANG C135/BUDDSTD C135/S,SEASN C135 Tantric Traditions of Asia 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages; East Asian Languages and Cultures; Group in Buddhist Studies; South and Southeast Asian Studies
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall and spring
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Lecture per week for 15 weeks.
The emergence of the tantras in seventh and eighth-century India marked a watershed for religious practice throughout Asia. These esoteric scriptures introduced complex new ritual technologies that transformed the religious traditions of India, from Brahmanism to Jainism and Buddhism, as well as those of Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, and Japan. This course provides an overview of tantric religion across these regions.
Instructor: Dalton
EA LANG 180 East Asian Film: Directors and their Contexts 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall and spring
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of lecture and 1 to 2 hours of discussion/film viewing per week.
Prerequisites: Upper divison or graduate standing.
A close analysis of the oeuvre of an East Asian director in its aesthetic, cultural, and political contexts.
Course may be repeated for credit. Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
EA LANG 181 East Asian Film: Special Topics in Genre 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of lecture and 1 to 2 hours of discussion/film viewing per week.
The study of East Asian films as categorized either by industry-identified genres (westerns, horror films, musicals, film noir, etc.) or broader interpretive modes (melodrama, realism, fantasy, etc).
EA LANG 198 Directed Group Study 1 - 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Offered for pass/not pass grade only.
Hours and format: Hours to be arranged.
Prerequisites: Junior or senior standing.
Small group instruction in topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses.
Enrollment is restricted; see the Introduction to Courses and Curricula section of this catalog.
EA LANG 199 Independent Study 1 - 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Undergraduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall, spring and summer
Grading: Offered for pass/not pass grade only.
Hours and format: Hours to be arranged.
Prerequisites: Junior or senior standing.
Independent study in topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses.
Enrollment is restricted; see the Introduction to Courses and Curricula section of this catalog.
EA LANG 200 Proseminar: Approaches to East Asian Studies 2 or 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Graduate
Term course may be offered: Fall
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Seminar per week for 15 weeks.
This course is a pro-seminar required for all entering graduate students in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures no matter their particular areas of interest. Its purpose is to introduce graduate students in the program to the major theoretical concerns, academic issues, and interpretive methodologies relevant to humanistic studies more generally and to the study of East Asian literature, thought, religion, and culture in particular. Supervising faculty change from year to year, as does the focus of the seminar.
EA LANG 202 Close Reading Area Studies: China and Japan in the World 2 or 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Course level: Graduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall and spring
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: 3 hours of Seminar per week for 15 weeks.
This course will consider alternative strategies and modes of close reading that can be relevant to the study of East Asia with a focus on China and Japan. As we concentrate on the historical role of philological research, translation studies, interdisciplinary scholarship and ask how "knowledge" about East Asia is produced in our fields, our readings on "close reading" will help us question the common sense of "civilization," culture," and "tradition," and explore new ways of asking questions about text and context, aesthetics and politics, cultural memory, historical narratives, and regimes of knowledge.
Course may be repeated for credit. Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes. Instructor: O'Neill
EA LANG C220/BUDDSTD C220/S,SEASN C220 Seminar in Buddhism and Buddhist Texts 2 or 4 Units
Department: East Asian Languages; East Asian Languages and Cultures; Group in Buddhist Studies; South and Southeast Asian Studies
Course level: Graduate
Terms course may be offered: Fall and spring
Grading: Letter grade.
Hours and format: unit(s):3 hours of seminar per week; 4 unit(s):3 hours of seminar per week.
Content varies with student interests. The course will normally focus on classical Buddhist texts that exist in multiple recensions and languages, including Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan.
Course may be repeated for credit. Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
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