This seminar focuses on the circulation of people, words, and ideas throughout Asia before 1900, as we try to understand the worlds travelers both sought and encountered. Texts include travel diaries and geographical narratives.

This seminar traces the changing forms of the Chinese book from the early ‘page’ to modern print editions. We begin by considering the Chinese writing system and the bones, shells, bamboo and silk on which it was first inscribed. Next, we examine the specific technologies associated with medieval manuscript and early print cultures, many of which were associated with Buddhist textual production. Along the way we consider the social dimensions of Chinese book culture by considering the scribes, binders, engravers, printers, publishers, distributors and readers who produced, circulated and consumed Chinese books. The course draws on the methods and theories developed in diverse fields of study, including book history, philology, literacy studies and archive studies, to examine different chapters in the history of the Chinese book.

This course begins with a careful study of a group of modern Japanese thinkers (Nishida, Tanabe, Nishitani) known as the Kyoto School (Kyoto Gaku-ha) who developed their original philosophies by creatively combining the spiritual and intellectual traditions of Mahayana Buddhism with the Western philosophical tradition, most notably with the work of Hegel and Heidegger. We focus on the concept of “Absolute Nothingness” and how it is similar and different to Western ontologies of Being as well as what it implies for political, psychological, spiritual, and artistic life. We also study significant criticisms of the Kyoto School (Tosaka, Miki, et al.) and re-evaluate how such a project persists today as well as how it might make a claim on possible futures.

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.

Land as part of the Earth is repeatedly reconfigured in China throughout the 20th century, first by the Reformists and pioneers of the New Culture, then by geoscientists and writers, as well as by economic planners and social thinkers of recent decades. This seminar provides a critical review of this multi-dimensional cultural and conceptual practice of land, as well as its possible role in the era of climate change.

A scholarly project chosen by the student, approved by the Department, and supervised by one of its instructors. Consult the website (eas.utoronto.ca) for more information. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

A scholarly project chosen by the student, approved by the Department, and supervised by one of its instructors. Consult the website (eas.utoronto.ca) for more information. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

A scholarly project chosen by the student, approved by the Department, and supervised by one of its instructors. Consult the website (eas.utoronto.ca) for more information. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

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 how the city and body exert formative forces on the text, and how the practice of writing and reading texts informs the ways we, as corporeal beings, experience the city as manifested in the 20th-century Japanese literature.

This seminar analyzes fascism in modern Japan: its ideology, theories, and practices. We define fascism as a symptom of imperialism, and also explore the critique of fascism in Japan by Japanese thinkers on the Left, such as Tosaka Jun, whose Japanese Ideology represents one of the most trenchant critiques of fascism.

In recent years, the basic hypotheses of Communism have begun to be thought anew, precisely because of the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of capitalism in communist regimes (i.e., China). Taking up recent writings by Alain Badiou, Jodi Dean, Gavin Walker, Fred Jameson and a host of other contemporary thinkers, this course asks again: what is the communist hypothesis in today’s Asia and how can it help us to imagine a different Asia?

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.

This course investigates salient problems of the historical archive in relation to the experience of modernity in East Asian societies. What is the meaning of the modern archive in East Asia? How is the knowledge of the modern archive produced in relation to the production of quantitative knowledge (e.g., in demographic or economic statistics)? How should we approach the relationship between number and language? How is this knowledge transformed into state knowledge as well as into what we call common sense?

Examination of how the future is imagined and materialized in architectural theory and practice throughout Japanese history. From classical temples to modernist experiments of the Metabolist movement to contemporary works by Isozaki Arata and Atelier Bow Wow, we study built and unbuilt structures as theories of the future.

This course examines the growth of the American empire in Asia Pacific during the late 19th century. It examines historical writings concerning Japan, Korea, Hawaii, the Philippines, and China.

This is an upper intermediate level Japanese course that focuses on reading and writing skills for those who have completed EAS350Y1 (previously EAS320Y1) 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 course examines the political economic, racial, and cultural dimensions of the Korean war in a global context. It examines how the Korean War consolidated Cold War structures and discourse on both sides of the conflict by examining such issues as the United Nations, multiculturalism, decolonization, atomic weapons, and military industrialization. In this writing intensive course, students will be expected to write a major research paper.

This is an upper intermediate level Japanese course that focuses on oral/aural communication for those who have completed EAS350Y1 (previously EAS320Y1) 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.

A selective survey of major historiographical problems and debates in the fields of late 19th and 20th century Chinese history. Course readings will include both theoretical and historical materials.

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.

The course discusses how images of Japan, charged with varied degrees of desire for empirical knowledge, have contributed to contemporary novels and plays by David Mitchell, Ruth L. Ozeki, David Mamet, Joy Kogawa, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marguerite Duras, and David Hwang.

An analysis of contemporary monographs on modern Japanese history. This course offers a critical survey of existing methodologies of and approaches to writing about modern Japan.

As a continuation of EAS358Y1 (formerly EAS206Y1), this course helps students to gain in-depth control of grammatical structures of classical Chinese and to read texts with greater ease. Requirements include a major research/translation project. Open only to EAS majors and specialists.

This research course examines the ways our historical understanding of the Cold War in East Asia has shifted over the last twenty years. Focusing primarily on the divided Korean peninsula where it can be said the Cold War still rages, the course examines the mutual constitution of two competing regional political economies rooted in a shared commitment to developmentalism.

This seminar introduces students to comparative studies of colonialism, focusing on Japanese colonialism in Korea. Students will read broadly in the historiography of the Japanese Empire with the goal of developing an understanding of trends that have shaped the research directions of the last ten years. Part of the course will also include readings in and discussion of comparative colonialism. The final statement will be an intensive state-of-the-field paper.

This essay-driven course explores the complexity of examining North Korean history by using comparative methods developed through the study of other socialist societies and theories of everyday life.

Uses seminal theoretical literature, photo roman (by, e.g., Abe, Nakagami) and narratives about photography (by, e.g., Tanizaki, Mishima, Kanai) to examine the rhetorical complicity and coercion of the two modes of representation which emerged in the modern and nationalistic age, and persist, in the wake of the newer media, as dominant registers of everyday life and departures from there.

This seminar examines resistance, struggles, strikes and movements seen as constituting a troubled history of democracy across Korea’s long 20th century.