| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| EAS 15J | RACE&NATION MOD JPN | PITT, J. | This course is designed to help Japanese and other East Asian Studies majors develop the skills they will use in upper division courses in the department. We will examine literature and film spanning nearly 150 years of Japan’s modern history. We will focus on how ideas concerning race and national identity structed Japan's experience of modernity, with special focus on the settler colonialism of Hokkaido and Japan's wartime imperial expansion. All readings will be in English. Through close engagement with these texts, we will focus on the following necessary skills for majors in the department: close reading, library and web-based research, analytical writing, and critical thinking. |
| EAS 15K | TASTE OF KOREA | SUH, S. | This course revolves around the premise that food is a pivotal component of culture, and we can have a better understanding of a people if we learn about their food. By examining how food is featured in literary works derived from Korea, the course aims to introduce students to Korean culture, history, and literature. In order to understand the historical context in which these literary works were written, students will also read excerpts from a Korean history textbook. All readings are in English. |
| EAS 55 | ON TAIWAN | SCRUGGS, B. | Students become familiar with Taiwanese fiction, film, culture, and history in the discourses of cultural and ecological postcolonialism, literary nativism and modernism, and globalization by reading short stories, two novels, and scholarly essays as well as watching fiction and documentary films. Grades are based on three exams, several quizzes, and section discussions. |
| EAS 110 | CHINESE ROOT SEEKING FICTION | SCRUGGS, B. | Root Seeking is widely recognized as one of the most important cultural movements in China in the second half of the twentieth century. In order to unpack and understand the arc of the movement from cutting edge cultural product to historical artifact students both read and watch milestone short stories and films, and read and discuss studies by Chinese, American, and European scholars on what the movement is and was. After taking the course students will be able to define generally Root Seeking and to consider specifically more complex questions such as whether the moment and movement arose spontaneously or if it was invented by practitioners and critics after the fact. |
| EAS 155 | CLTRS COLONIALSM | SUH, S. | By drawing on literary works that depict interactions between the colonized and the colonizer during Japanese colonial rule over Korea (1910-45), this course examines the complicated terrain of day-to-day life in a subjugated land under foreign rule. In order to appreciate the implications of the literary works for examining the issue of colonialism and to understand the stories’ historical context, students will also read critical essays on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and excerpts from a history book on Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea. All readings are in English (same as 26100 GlblClt 103B, Lec A) |
| EAS 160 | KOREAN CINEMA | KIM, K. | This course examines the South Korean cinema today, and seeks to understand how it is shaped by re-interpretation of history and genre bending. The course will explore the Korean film history, aesthetics, and commercial industry, and also analyze several key texts that are critical to their understanding. This class, I insist, is on learning how to watch, think about, and write about film; in the same vein that we need to learn how to think about literature or other topics in humanities. Please be advised that some of the films featured in this class may contain scenes of explicit sexual or violent nature. All films listed on the syllabus as required viewing will be available with English subtitles. (same as 24240 Flm&Mda 160, Lec A) |
| EAS 220 | BLUE HUM:OCEANIC JP | PITT, J. | This seminar explores readings in the Blue Humanities and turns its attention to the ocean as a site of connection, migration, empire building, and more-than-human alterity and knwoledge-buidling. In particular, we will focus on the Pacific and think about how studying the sea opens possibilities for transpacific research. We will read theoretical works by Steve Mentz, Villem Flusser, Teresa Shewry, Wiliam Tsutsui, Candice Fujikane, and Melody Jue (among others), in addition to environmental histories of Japan's oceans and littoral zones, and primary texts of Japanese literature and film that prominently feature the ocean. No Japanese language knowledge is required. |