| source Berkeley (X) |
level |
department East Asian Languages and Cultures (X) |
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. Also listed as South and Southeast Asian Studies C52 and Group in Buddhist Studies C50.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
This course is a wide-ranging investigation of Korean literary and visual practices that hypothesize an alternative sociocultural realm. In particular, we will consider various modes of spatial narration (utopic, dystopic, cosmological, global, nautical, urban, rural, architectural, and institutional) that foreground the motif of a overseas journey. The course focuses particularly on the issues of identity in the context of various narrative itineraries and considers the social, historical, and cultural moments that produced them. All readings will be in English.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
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.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
This course creates a global and historical context for understanding contemporary Chinese fiction. We will consider how the close intertwining of history and the strange in early Chinese writing was critically reappropriated in early 20th-century East Asian fiction; how imaginary Chinas have informed experiments with writing the past in Europe and Latin America; and how such experiments have provided contemporary Chinese writers with new lenses through which to explore their own histories. All readings will be in English.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
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.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
The Chinese 19th century was a tumultuous and pivotal era, one which witnessed both the zenith and the precipitous decline of the Qing dynasty, the complex and violent encounter between a Chinese empire and the forces of global imperialism, and the consequent advent of a new colonial modernity in China. In this course, we will study these world-historical transformations as they are registered and represented in literary, historical, and visual texts produced both in China and Victorian England.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
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.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
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.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
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.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
An introductory course on Chinese poetry, both ancient and modern, in English translation. The course will explore poetic translation, across languages, across cultures, and across historical ages, not merely from the perspective of the "accuracy" with which a classic text is represented in the translation, but as a window into the nature of poetic tradition and poetic writing itself. Works to be covered in the course will be primarily drawn from the Chinese tradition, but in the interest of allowing a comparative discussion of the course's central themes, a significant amount of reading, also in translation, from ancient and modern Greek poetry will be included as well. The goal of the class is not simply to gain familiarity with Chinese poetry and poets, but more fundamentally to gain skill and sophistication in reading, responding to, and thinking about poetry.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
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.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
This course is both an historical introduction to the Silk Road, understood as an ever-changing series of peoples, places, and traditions, as well as an introduction to the study of those same peoples, places, and traditions in the modern period. In this way, the class is intended both as a guide to the extant textual, archaeological, and art historical evidence from the Silk Road, but also as a framework for thinking about what it means to study Asia and Asian religions in the context of a contemporary American classroom. All readings will be in English. Also listed as Group in Buddhist Studies C120.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will explore the nature and function of Buddhist meditation as it developed within various Buddhist traditions of South, Southeast, and East Asia. Emphasis will be on the historical evolution, doctrinal foundations, and monastic and extra-monastic regimens associated with Buddhist meditation practices. We will make use of a wide variety of primary and secondary readings as well as visual materials (including films) to attempt to place the historical and doctrinal accounts within their cultural and institutional contexts. Also listed as Group in Buddhist Studies C122.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will use the medium of film to explore various themes in the study of Buddhism. At the same time, we will use ideas culled from Buddhism to reflect back on the nature and power of film. We will be screening a wide variety of international and domestic films, from Hollywood blockbusters to small independent films amd documentaries. Themes to be considered include the epistemic status of the viewing subject, the place of imagination and visualization in Buddhist mediation and ritual, contesting Asian and Western notions of Buddhist authority, Orientalism, and the role of projection and fantasy in cinematic representations of Buddhism. The films will be accompanied by primary and secondary readings in Buddhist history and literature, religious studies, and film theory. Also listed as Group in Buddhist Studies C124.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
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. Also listed as Group in Buddhist Studies C126.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
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. Also listed as South and Southeast Asian Studies C145 and Group in Buddhist Studies C128.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
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. Also listed as Group in Buddhist Studies C130.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
A close analysis of the oeuvre of an East Asian director in its aesthetic, cultural, and political contexts.
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page
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).
Score: 10.168762 Details | Listing | Web page