East Asian Languages & Literatures

Courses

Courses in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels are listed in Yale College Programs of Study. See also

CHNS 570a, Introduction to Literary Chinese I  Pauline Lin

Reading and interpretation of texts in various styles of literary Chinese (wenyan), with attention to basic problems of syntax and literary style. Prerequisite: CHNS 151 or CHNS 153 or equivalent.
TTh 9am-10:15am

CHNS 571b, Introduction to Literary Chinese II  Yun Bai

Continuation of CHNS 570. Reading and interpretation of texts in various styles of literary Chinese (wenyan), with attention to basic problems of syntax and literary style. Prerequisite: CHNS 570 or equivalent.
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

EALL 506b / EAST 550 / HSAR 509b, Japan’s Classics in Text and Image  Edward Kamens and Mimi Yiengpruksawan

An introduction to the Japanese classics (poetry, narrative fiction, drama) in their manifestations in multiple media, especially in the visual and material realm. Special reference to and engagement with a Yale University Art Gallery installation of rare books, paintings, and other works of art from Japan. No knowledge of Japanese required.
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

EALL 511a / EAST 541, Women and Literature in Traditional China  Kang-i Sun Chang

This course focuses on major women writers in traditional China, as well as representations of women by male authors. Topics include the power of women’s writing; women and material culture; women in exile; courtesans; Taoist and Buddhist nuns; widow poets; the cross-dressing women; the female body and its metaphors; foot binding and its implications; women’s notion of love and death; the aesthetic of illness; women and revolution; women’s poetry clubs; the function of memory in women’s literature; problems of gender and genre. All readings in translation; no knowledge of Chinese required. Some Chinese texts provided for students who read Chinese.
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

EALL 530a, Poetry and Ethics Amidst Imperial Collapse  Lucas Bender

Du Fu has for the last millennium been considered China’s greatest poet. Close study of nearly one-sixth of his complete works, contextualized by selections from the tradition that defined the art in his age. Exploration of the roles literature plays in interpreting human lives and the ways different traditional forms shape different ethical orientation. Poetry as a vehicle for moral reflection. All readings are in English.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

EALL 552a, Japanese Cinema before 1960  Aaron Gerow

The history of Japanese cinema to 1960, including the social, cultural, and industrial backgrounds to its development. Periods covered include the silent era, the coming of sound and the wartime period, the occupation era, the golden age of the 1950s, and the new modernism of the late 1950s.
MW 1pm-2:15pm, T 7pm-10pm

EALL 555b, Japanese Modernism  Seth Jacobowitz

Japanese literature and art from the 1920s through the 1940s. The avant-garde and mass culture; popular genre fiction; the advent of new media technologies and techniques; effects of Japanese imperialism, militarism, and fascism on cultural production; experimental writers and artists and their resistance to, or complicity with, the state.
MW 1pm-2:15pm

EALL 565b, Japanese Literature after 1970  Stephen Poland

Study of Japanese literature published between 1970 and the present. Writers may include Murakami Ryu, Maruya Saiichi, Shimada Masahiko, Nakagami Kenji, Yoshimoto Banana, Yamada Eimi, Murakami Haruki, and Medoruma Shun. No knowledge of Japanese required.
TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm

EALL 586a / CPLT 952a, Modern Novel in Japan and Brazil  Seth Jacobowitz

Brazilian and Japanese novels from the late nineteenth century to the present. Representative texts from major authors are read in pairs to explore their commonalities and divergences. Topics include nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, the rise of mass culture and the avant-garde, and existentialism and postmodernism.
MW 4pm-5:15pm

EALL 593a / CPLT 558a / EAST 554, Hiroshima to Fukushima: Ecology and Culture in Japan  Stephen Poland

This course explores how Japanese literature, cinema, and popular culture have engaged with questions of environment, ecology, pollution, and climate change from the wake of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 to the ongoing Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in the present. Environmental disasters and the slow violence of their aftermath have had an enormous impact on Japanese cultural production, and we examine how these cultural forms seek to negotiate and work through questions of representing the unrepresentable, victimhood and survival, trauma and national memory, uneven development and discrimination, the human and the nonhuman, and climate change’s impact on imagining the future. Special attention is given to the possibilities and limitations of different forms—the novel, poetry, film, manga, anime—that Japanese writers and artists have to think about humans’ relationship with our environment.
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

EALL 599b, Decolonizing East Asia  Stephen Poland

This course explores how literary and cinematic works engaged with, promoted, critiqued, and struggled with empire and colonization in East Asia from the late-nineteenth century to the present. We explore how the very ideas of “literature” and “cinema” in East Asia were entangled with the rise of the Japanese empire in the context of imperial rivalry with Europe, and how these categories were contested and transformed by writers and filmmakers in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The course also examines how discourses of empire and colonization continued to be relevant in post-WWII cultural works grappling with the neoimperialism of Soviet-American Cold War order. Finally, we consider questions of empire and colonization after the Cold War, especially in terms of the rise of China and continued relevance of past imperial formations in twenty-first-century cultural production.
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

EALL 600a / EAST 640, Sinological Methods  Pauline Lin

A research course in Chinese studies, designed for students with background in modern and literary Chinese. Exploration and evaluation of the wealth of primary sources and research tools available in Chinese. For native speakers of Chinese, introduction to the secondary literature in English and instruction in writing professionally in English on topics about China. Topics include the compilation and development of Chinese bibliographies; bibliophiles’ notes; editions, censorship, and textual variation and reliability; specialized dictionaries; maps and geographical gazetteers; genealogies and biographical sources; archaeological and visual materials; and major Chinese encyclopedias and compendia.
F 1:30pm-3:20pm

EALL 602a, Readings in Classical Chinese Prose  Kang-i Sun Chang

Close reading of classical Chinese texts (wenyan) primarily from late Imperial China. A selection of formal and informal prose, including memoirs, sanwen essays, classical tales, biographies, and autobiographies. Focus on cultural and historical contexts, with attention to reception in China and in some cases in Korea and Japan. Questions concerning readership and governmental censorship, function of literature, history and fictionality, memory and writing, and the aesthetics of qing (emotion). Readings in Chinese; discussion in English. Prerequisite: CHNS 171 or equivalent, or permission of instructor.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

EALL 604b, Li Yu (1610–1680): Playwright, Storyteller, Pornographer  Tina Lu

Students read across the complete works of this major seventeenth-century figure. Li Yu was a short story writer, a playwright, a literary critic, an essayist, and a pornographer. Each week we read a substantial amount of Li Yu’s writings to better understand his corpus as a whole and also as a window onto seventeenth-century culture. Prerequisite: CHNS 171 or permission of the instructor.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

EALL 657a, Meiji Literature and Visual Culture  Seth Jacobowitz

Introduction to the literature and visual culture of Meiji Japan (1868–1912), including novels, poetry, calligraphy, woodblock prints, painting, photography, and cinema. The relationship between theories and practices of fine art and literature; changes in word and image relations; transformations from woodblock to movable-type print culture; the invention of photography and early forms of cinematic practice.
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

EALL 700a / EAST 700 / RLST 594a, The Three Teachings in Medieval China  Lucas Bender and Eric Greene

This course explores intersections between the Three Teachings—Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism—in late medieval China, focusing on the seventh through the ninth century. Too often studied in isolation from one another, these religious and intellectual teachings were deeply intertwined throughout this period, and scholars aiming to understand the religious, intellectual, and literary history of the Tang need to be able to read broadly across their boundaries. All primary readings are in classical/literary Chinese. Open to undergraduates with sufficient language skills. Prerequisite: reading ability in classical/literary Chinese.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

EALL 710a / EAST 710 / HSAR 822a, Fragmentism and Assemblage in Traditional Japanese Culture  Edward Kamens and Mimi Yiengpruksawan

A cross-disciplinary consideration of the phenomenon of disaggregation of texts and visual artworks and their reconfiguration in new forms. Focus on examples from the Japanese past in comparative and theoretical perspective. Students engage directly in the preparation of an installation on this theme in the Yale Art Gallery for spring 2019. Prerequisite: proficiency in literary and modern Japanese.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

EALL 773b / ANTH 531b / ARCG 531b / CLSS 815b / HIST 502b / HSAR 564b / JDST 653b / NELC 533b / RLST 803b, Sensory Experiences in Ancient Ritual  Carolyn Laferriere and Andrew Turner

A comparative exploration of the role the senses played in the performance of ancient and premodern ritual, drawing from a range of ancient traditions including those of Greece, Rome, and Egypt, and from cultural traditions of the Near East, India, China, and the New World. Placing particular emphasis on the relationship between art and ritual, we discuss the methods available for reconstructing ancient sensory experience, how the ancient cultures conceived of the senses and perception, and how worshipers’ sensory experiences, whether visual, sonic, olfactory, gustatory, or haptic, were integral aspects in their engagement with the divine within religious ritual. This seminar incorporates material in the Yale Art Gallery.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

EALL 801b, Media Theory, Capitalism, and Japanese Modernity  Seth Jacobowitz

This course introduces students to key aspects of Western media theory and media history through readings by leading thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Friedrich Kittler, Lewis Mumford, Martin Heidegger, and Marshall McLuhan. It then brings these works into dialogue with recent critical studies of Japanese modernity, capitalism, and contemporary information society by Naoki Sakai, Karatani Kojin, Akira Lippit, Azuma Hiroki, and others. All readings are in English.
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

EALL 805b / FILM 871b, Readings in Japanese Film Theory  Aaron Gerow

Theorizations of film and culture in Japan from the 1910s to the present. Through readings in the works of a variety of authors, the course explores both the articulations of cinema in Japanese intellectual discourse and how this embodies the shifting position of film in Japanese popular cultural history.
F 1:30pm-3:30pm

EALL 850b, Theory in/and East Asia  Stephen Poland

This seminar engages with the question of what “Theory” might mean in the context of East Asian cultural studies. Many critiques have been made of the way “traveling theory” serves as a Euro-American universal applied to the “raw material” of East Asian texts, or as a transdisciplinary common language in the humanities and social sciences. We take this notion as a starting point to explore the intersections and interactions of “Theory” and “East Asia.” Questions include: What is Theory? Who gets to theorize? How have thinkers in East Asia engaged with Theory? How has Theory engaged with East Asia? What have been the major issues and debates in Theory, and how can they apply to scholarship on East Asian cultural production? How can the work of thinkers in/of East Asia offer critiques of Theory, and what problems arise from such challenges? These questions will also be situated in the historical context of disciplinary formation and the creation of Area Studies in universities in the United States. Readings are primarily in English, but may also include Japanese, Chinese, or Korean depending on student interest and language abilities.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

EALL 873a / EAST 573a / HIST 873a, China and the World circa 1900  Peter Perdue and Jing Tsu

Reading and discussion of significant themes in China and world history in the first decade of the twentieth century. We concentrate on topics that contain international, transnational, and comparative implications, and include discussion of literary and historical material. Most readings are in English, but selected primary sources in Asian languages may be used. Open to all History, East Asian Studies, and East Asian Languages and Literatures students, and others by request. Includes research paper and weekly writing exercises. Prerequisite: knowledge of one foreign language, European or Asian.
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

EALL 900a or b, Directed Readings  Staff

Offered by permission of instructor and DGS to meet special needs not met by regular courses.
HTBA

EALL 990a or b, Directed Research  Staff

Offered as needed with permission of instructor and DGS for student preparation of dissertation prospectus.
HTBA

JAPN 510a or b, Japanese for Sinologists  Masahiko Seto

Intensive Japanese reading course designed for Sinologists. Includes canonical texts from the nineteenth to the twentieth century by Japanese scholars of Chinese history, literature, cultural studies, and law. Reading comprehension and grammar as well as vocabulary are strengthened. The principal text is Japanese for Sinologists by Joshua A. Fogel and Fumiko Joo. Prerequisite: JAPN 150 or equivalent.
HTBA

JAPN 570a, Introduction to Literary Japanese  Edward Kamens

Introduction to the grammar and style of the premodern literary language (bungotai) through a variety of texts. Prerequisite: JAPN 151 or equivalent.
TTh 9am-10:15am

JAPN 571b, Readings in Literary Japanese  Adam Haliburton

Close analytical reading of a selection of texts from the Nara through Tokugawa period: prose, poetry, and various genres. Introduction of kanbun. Prerequisite: JAPN 570 or equivalent.
TTh 4pm-5:15pm