This course is a basic beginners' level Japanese language course, which is designed for those who have completed EAS1352H with a minimum grade of 70%. All students must go through a screening process conducted by the Department. See https://www.eas.utoronto.ca/languages/japanese for details.

This course, which is a continuation of EAS1353H, is for students who have a good foundation of lower beginners' grammar, vocabulary, and kanji knowledge and have not yet acquired the proficiency required to take EAS1355Y (previously EAS1303Y). All students must go through a screening process conducted by the Department. See https://www.eas.utoronto.ca/languages/japanese for details.

This is a lower intermediate level course for those who have completed EAS1354H with a minimum grade of 70%. All students must go through a screening process conducted by the Department. See https://www.eas.utoronto.ca/languages/japanese for details.

This is an upper intermediate level Japanese course that focuses on reading and writing skills for those who have completed EAS1355Y (previously EAS1303Y) with a minimum grade of 70%. Native or near-native speakers are not permitted to take this course. All students must go through a screening process conducted by the department. See https://www.eas.utoronto.ca/languages/japanese for details.

This is an upper intermediate level Japanese course that focuses on oral/aural communication for those who have completed EAS1355Y (previously EAS1303Y) with a minimum grade of 70%. Native or near-native speakers are not permitted to take this course. All students must go through a screening process conducted by the department. See https://www.eas.utoronto.ca/languages/japanese for details.

Readings from ancient and medieval Chinese philosophy. Beginning with linguistic (especially semantic) analysis of key words, structure and meaning of sentences, paragraphs, and texts as a whole, which forms the basis for philosophical examination.

A general survey of modern Taiwanese literature from 1949 to the present. It examines issues central to understanding the Taiwanese literary culture, such as historical/cultural context, oral/written language, self-identification, gender, and human rights.

This course explores ancient societies from prehistory to the Bronze Age of China from archaeological perspectives with a focus on Chinese collections at the Royal Ontario Museum. The course offers students an understanding of the origins and formation of Chinese civilizations.

This course explores topics in Archaeology of Ancient China.

A workshop format is used to explore problems encountered when translating Korean literary texts (fiction and poetry) into English. Practice with a variety of texts is accompanied by readings in translation theory to refine our understanding of translation and enrich our experience working with historical forms of Korean and English.

Few events in the twentieth century have exerted more lasting impact on the formation, transformation, and self-consciousness of modern Chinese culture than the May Fourth Movement. What is May Fourth and why does it matter? On the one hand, May Fourth ushered in an age of everything new — new culture, new science, and new revolution — jettisoning all things old and Chinese; on the other, it sought to reinvent a form of Chinese nationalism that would not only salvage the nation in peril but also maintain a certain continuity with what was understood to be Chinese. Imagining ourselves as the "new youth" of that new era, we take this seminar as a discursive center where intense cultural, intellectual, and political debates took place and we seek to understand the literary, aesthetic, epistemological, and political implications of this seismic events that came to be defined as the May Fourth Movement, rethinking its legacy, challenges, and unfulfilled promises.

For centuries past, pilgrims, merchants, pleasure-seekers, diplomats, and refugees have set out (on foot, on boats, on camels/horses) across Asia. What they wrote about traveling can tell us a great deal about how they dealt with the unknown or alien, about how they understood their places in the world, and also about how history and geography share a fuzzy boundary with imagined narratives. In this class we will read first-hand and second-hand accounts describing these travels across centuries, in order to understand not only the cultural contingencies but also the historical conditions for their travels. We will combine these texts with visual material to understand not only the physical mobility of people throughout history, but also the cultural mobility of knowledge, ideas, and narratives.

This course examines the history of the Chinese book from the earliest forms of the Chinese 'page' to modern print editions. We will begin with the formation of the Chinese writing system and the bones, shells, silk, and bamboo slips on which it was first inscribed in the centuries BCE. We will then trace the rise of specific commodities and technologies associated with medieval manuscript and early print cultures, including paper, the scroll and codex formats, and the woodblock — many of which were associated with Buddhist textual production. We will conclude by surveying scholarship on the social history of the Chinese book and book culture in the early modern and modern periods. Along the way we will draw on the methods and theories developed in diverse fields of study, including book history, philology, literacy studies, and archive studies to examine unique chapters in the history of the Chinese book.

This course reviews and develops the basic Marxist discourse of the revolutionary transition from capitalist society to communist society according to Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung. In doing so, we learn key problems and concepts in the Marxist discourse of transition and revolution, e.g., the dictatorship of the proletariat, the 'withering away of the state,' and 'planning,' all problems that have animated the modern history of East Asia from the late 19th century into the 20th and early 21st centuries. In the second half of the course, we study contemporary discourses on revolution and transition from three perspectives: Uno Kozo's theory of capitalist crisis (or economic crisis); theories of feminist Marxism and anti-racism; and Foucault's theory of the subject. The goal of the course is to reconstruct the Marxist theory of revolution and transition in light of today's multiple crises of capitalism.

Given the contemporary climate of identity politics, how should we grasp the relation between difference and capital? Rather than considering difference as a social positivity and a given identity that is divorced from the logic of capital, this course approaches difference as it is (re)produced within capital's logic and the historical and materialist development of capitalism itself. In Part 1, we review the logic of capital through the theoretical lens of Marx's Capital, Volume One (1867), paying particular attention to the basic 'doctrines' of circulation, production, and distribution of capital. In Part 2, we investigate diverse methods and techniques by which capitalist development historically (re)produces difference in terms of the division of the world; uneven and combined development; nation, race, and gender; and civilizational difference. By clarifying how difference is (re)produced historically by capitalist development, this course seeks to debunk how difference-as-identity is naturalized in ideology. The course is also intended to give students the increasingly rare opportunity to practice narrating the logic of capital according to Marx.

Adaptations are interesting sites where transcultural dynamics unfold through character portrayal, story arcs, and space-time settings in many films throughout the history of Hong Kong cinema. This course introduces students to the rich variety of literary genres upon which Hong Kong's film adaptations are based and the ways in which Hong Kong literary works are also inspired by various films. With a selection of source texts and film adaptations from Hong Kong screens since the early twentieth century, the course aspires to deepen students' understanding of the interaction between literature and film where the issue of cultural identity has been negotiated in the evolving social and historical context in Hong Kong.

The focus ranges from the examination of cross-cultural theoretical problems (such as Orientalism) to a director-based focus, from the examination of genre (such as documentary or the category of genre itself) to the way film intersects with other cultural forms and technologies (such as video and new media).

This seminar provides an opportunity for in-depth reading and research into a specific topic in the cultural and intellectual history of Korea. Topics will vary each semester but may include colonial period print culture, the New Woman, the history of photography, and modernism.

This course explores Rethinking Realism in 20th Century Korea.

Focusing on the literature of the late colonial period through the late 1950s, this intensive reading seminar will explore ways of configuring modernism mid-century on the Korean peninsula. Topics covered will include: decolonization as a literary event, postcolonial memory, fascist aesthetics, Cold War regimes of style and the gender of writing. Reading knowledge of Korean required.

In this year’s seminar, "Crisis, Population, Archive," we look at three inter-related problems: 1) the theory of historical repetition (Marx, Deleuze, Karatani); 2) Uno Kozo's Theory of Crisis, the theory of capitalist cycles, and the theory of stages of capitalist development; and 3) the question of the historical archive and historical writing. Developing Marxist traditions and straddling disciplines in both the social sciences and the humanities, we return to past investigations of a series of critical and theoretically productive concepts for the practice of "writing history": repetition and contingency; crisis and cycles; class and surplus populations; and state power and stages of capitalist development. The goal of this conceptual itinerary is to develop a method to approach the historical archive, and ultimately to transform existing archives, which, under the monopolization and despotism of the state, tend towards positivism ("facts") and quantitative abstractions ("statistics"). In transforming existing archives, we instead produce, document, and write what Lenin called "the concrete analysis of the concrete situation", or 現状分析. The analysis of the "concreteness" of the "situation," however, requires that we carefully analyze questions of materialism, ideology, the historical present, and the treacherous and dis-Orient-ing ideologies of capitalist, imperialist, and colonial modes of representation.

This course studies Bildungsroman, the story of an individual's coming of age, in the context of twentieth-century political, cultural, and social developments of imperialism, anti-colonialism, human rights discourse, and globalization. Our focus will be novels from the (post)colonial world and theoretical essays on the Bildungsroman form. The course aims to provide a model for rethinking literary history and genres within a global context. Authors may include Yi Kwangsu, Wu Zhouliu, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Kang Younghill, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Camara Laye, amongst others.

This course examines the ways that exteriority (rather than interiority), specifically urban space, informs and is registered in literary texts in relation to the perceiving subject's body in its entirety, including and yet not reduced to the eye. The body is considered not to be opposed to the mind, but to be coordinated with the mind. Inspired by theories of senses (sound, smell, taste, touch, as well as sight), spatial practices (e.g., walking, riding vehicles), and non-literary art forms (e.g., photography, film, architecture, and urban planning), we will reconsider how literary texts we read and write are neither autonomous nor static but are exposed to and interact with the world of multi-sensoriality and the multi-media. The city's mode of operation, the itinerant and kinetic movement of the body, and the traffic of the gaze, gesture, and other sensual relations between bodies and between bodies and things in the city have a crucial impact on the ways that texts are formed. In turn, literary discourse informs those who experience their environs of ways to read, make sense of, and grapple with urban space. We will discuss how the city, the body, and the text help to form and transform each other, in spatially and corporeally conscious stories, travelogues, and novels (in excerpts) of the late nineteenth to early twenty-first century Japanese literature. The city is not just a setting for stories. The body is not subordinate to the mind. And the text is not just a medium of representation. These three cannot be thought of autonomously of one another in the age of literature after the spatial turn and geography after the narrative turn.

This course provides a basic methodological framework for conducting historical research in the social sciences and humanities based on Marx's Capital. In our reading of Capital, we focus on how Marx theorized the "organic" components of capitalism, i.e., Labour Power and Land, and develop these concepts further through the problem of "othering."

The line of inquiry of this seminar returns to the notion of the "communist hypothesis" from an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist perspective. From this double-perspective, we reconsider the Idea of communism in relation to questions of transition, political organization, and revolution. The course begins with readings in contemporary debates on Communism, the Party, "critical theory," and revisits Marx and Engels' Communist Manfesto. In the second part, we investigate the notion of transition through a Marxist theory of capitalist crisis and a theory of stages of capitalist development. Here, we focus on the works of Marx, Lenin, and Uno Kozo. Finally, we explore questions of communism in the context of "modern" Asia and address specific problems of transition, imperialism, "militarism," and fascism.

This seminar explores the growing field of sound studies with particular attention given to auditory histories and cultures in modern Japan and the prewar Japanese empire in East Asia. We study the interrelationships between industrialization, mass culture, colonialism, and techniques and processes of reproducing sound in order to specify the status of acoustic and sonic mediation in everyday life in a capitalist commodity economy.

How do we build something for the future? Whose future? What future? What is the future? And who is this "we" that will build something for this future that is so slippery to know? While we're at it: to build? Must all buildings be built for them to be buildings? What about dreams? Political movements? Personal relationships? Are they buildings too? And what about the unbuilt and the not-built? The act of unbuilding and not-building? In this seminar we will explore these creeping questions and examine how the future is imagined and materialized in architectural theory and practice throughout Japanese history. From the Ise Shrine of the seventh century to modernist experiments of the Metabolist movement, from contemporary works by Isozaki Arata, Atelier Bow Wow, and Kuma Kengo's new Olympic Stadium to our own crazy experiments, we will study built, unbuilt, and non-built structures as theories of the future…and significant acts of the present.

This course explores the historical and systematic aspects of classical Confucianism, which is fundamental for understanding Chinese philosophy and culture. The historical part discusses the development of the Confucian doctrine from Confucius to his generations of disciples. The systematic part engages issues such as emotion, art, poetry, morality and virtues, political philosophy, and knowledge and reality.

This seminar explores the key literary, doctrinal and ritual innovations of the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition as it unfolded in the first few centuries of the Common Era. The semester will begin with a consideration of the origins of the Mahāyāna in early India, and end in medieval Mahāyāna communities of East Asia and Tibet. Along the way we will conduct close readings of several important Mahāyāna works (sūtras, commentaries, ritual manuals) in order to explore key elements in the development of the Great Vehicle as it was transmitted and transformed across Buddhist Asia.

What is media's role in shaping the materiality and definition of modern warfare? How has the concept of war changed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries after the idea of total war appeared? From image-making machine and drone, to algorithm, satellite mapping, and artificial intelligence, war is the inventor of new sensory regimes that arise from the media environments constructed by warring empires. This course examines the entanglement between militarism and media technologies, and aesthetics and the war machine to historicize the militarization of the senses.