2020-2021

During these uncertain times, this course explores the uncertain boundaries between illusion and reality, dream and waking, form and emptiness, and self and other. We will traverse these paired themes of Buddhist significance as they arise in Chinese literary works from another epoch of uncertainty: the twilight of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Our starting point will be the Heart Sutra’s famous assertion that “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Accepting the uncertainty this statement inspires, we will investigate this and other distinctive indistinctions through works of fiction, drama, autobiography, and poetry. Along the way, we will examine (and call into question) the distinction between Buddhist and literary concerns: What makes literature suitable for reflecting on Buddhist ideas about being? What insights does Buddhist philosophy grant into how we engage with literature and other forms of mediated experience? No prior knowledge of Chinese language or history is necessary. All materials will be provided by the instructor and read in translation (with Chinese available upon request).

This course introduces models of comparative analysis across national literatures, genres, and media. The readings pair primary texts with theoretical texts, each pair addressing issues of interdisciplinary comparison. They include Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” and Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”; Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” Kafka’s “Josephine the Mouse Singer,” Deleuze and Guattari, "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature," and Mario Vargas Llosa’s "The Storyteller"; Victor Segalen’s "Stèles"; Fenollosa and Pound’s “The Chinese Character as a Medium of Poetry” and Eliot Weinberger’s "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei"; Mérimée, “Carmen,” Bizet, "Carmen," and the film adaptation "U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha" (South Africa, 2005); Gorky’s and Kurosawa’s "The Lower Depths"; Molière, Tartuffe, Dostoevsky, "The Village Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants," and Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”; Gogol, "The Overcoat" and Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made.”

This course explores representations of queerness, same-sex love and sexualities and debates around them by introducing students to a variety of literary texts translated from Asian languages as well as Asian films, geographically ranging from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea and Singapore. We will also read scholarship that will help us place the production and reception of these primary sources in historical, political, cultural and religious contexts. In particular, we will examine questions of history and continuity (recurrent themes and images); form and genre (differences of representation in mythological narratives, poetry, biography, fiction, erotic/legal/medical treatises); the relationship of gender to sexuality (differences and similarities between representations of male-male and female-female relations); queerness as a site for exploring other differences, such as caste or religious difference; and questions of cross-cultural and transnational dialogue and cultural specificity. This course is part one of a two-quarter sequence, with the second part offered in Winter Quarter 2021. Each quarter can also be taken separately. Students need to be available for 2 synchronous online meetings per week.