The undergraduate major in Chinese Language at UC Berkeley is a comprehensive program dedicated to the humanistic study of East Asia. This major is structured to develop high proficiency in modern and classical Chinese, equipping students with the skills necessary for critical and informed engagement with East Asian texts. The curriculum aims to foster a deep understanding of the region's historical, literary, philosophical, and cultural dimensions, particularly as they have evolved into modern times.
Course Structure:
Language Mastery: Emphasis on spoken and written modern Chinese, with introductory training in classical Chinese.
Interdisciplinary Exploration: Courses cover various subjects, including literature, popular culture, philosophy, and linguistics. These are available in translation and the original languages, encouraging a multidimensional understanding of East Asian cultures.
Regional Comparative Context: The program places the study of China and Chinese within an East Asian framework, introducing students to diverse disciplinary and comparative perspectives.
Honors Program:
Students who demonstrate exceptional academic ability can undertake an honors thesis. Details on requirements and application procedures are under the Major Requirements tab.
This major advances language skills, cultivates critical thinking, and produces effective writing, preparing students for various careers and global interactions.
Minor
For students interested in deepening their understanding of Chinese language and culture, the University of California, Berkeley offers a minor in Chinese through the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures (EALC). This minor program allows students to immerse themselves in the language of China while also exploring its rich literature, religion, and cultural aspects via a selection of elective courses.
This minor is an excellent opportunity for those who wish to enhance their linguistic skills and cultural literacy in a global context. It is ideal for students pursuing careers in international relations, global business, or academia, among other fields. The program emphasizes language proficiency and cultural understanding, providing a well-rounded educational experience in Chinese studies.
Students should review the requirements on the Minor Requirements tab and check the department's Chinese minor page. After completing the prerequisite, students can apply for the minor online.
Other Majors and Minors Offered by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
In addition to the University, campus, and college requirements, listed on the College Requirements tab, students must fulfill the requirements specific to their major program.
General Guidelines
All courses that fulfill the major requirements below must be taken for graded credit.
No more than one upper division course may simultaneously fulfill requirements for a student's major and minor programs, except for minors offered outside the College of Letters & Science.
A minimum grade point average (GPA) of 2.0 must be maintained in both upper- and lower-division courses used to fulfill the major requirements.
Please see the College Requirements tab for information regarding residence and unit requirements.
Major in Chinese
Prerequisites (Must earn a letter grade of C or higher)
CHINESE 1A or 1X: Elementary Chinese
CHINESE 7A or 7B: Introduction to Chinese Literature (must be taken at UC Berkeley)
Requirements (including prerequisites)
Lower Division Requirements
Elementary Chinese: CHINESE Chinese 1A & 1B or 1X & 1Y
Intermediate Chinese: CHINESE 10A & 10B or 10X & 10Y\
Introduction to Chinese Literature: CHINESE 7A and 7B
Upper Division Requirements
Language
Advanced Chinese: CHINESE 100A & 100B or 100X & 100Y
Classical Chinese: CHINESE 110A & 110B
Modern Chinese: One course numbered CHINESE 150-159
East Asian Literature & Culture
One East Asian (EALANG) upper-division course
Electives
Two courses offered by EALC in Chinese, EALANG, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, or Tibetan
Students placed out of required language courses must complete additional advisor-approved courses the Department offers to fulfill unit requirements.
No more than two upper-division courses can be taken outside the EALC department, and the undergraduate advisor must approve them. A course syllabus may be necessary for approval. Requests for approval may be submitted online.
Declaring the Major
Students are admitted to the major after completing the prerequisites (with a grade of C or higher). For information regarding the prerequisites, please see the major requirements on this page. For the most up-to-date information, students can view the department's Chinese major page. Students are advised to begin preparation for the major as soon as possible while completing university, college, and department requirements.
Completion of 12 units of upper-division language courses within the department.
A minimum GPA of 3.5 in these courses.
An overall GPA of 3.0 at the university.
Program Structure and Requirements:
Qualified seniors may apply for admission to the honors program.
Accepted students will enroll in CHINESE H195A and CHINESE H195B honors courses over two consecutive semesters.
Participants must complete an honors thesis submitted by the 13th week of the semester in which they expect to graduate.
Guidance and Assessment:
During the program, students will undertake independent advanced study under the guidance of an assigned honors thesis adviser.
A faculty committee will evaluate the completed thesis and the student's overall performance within the department to determine the level of honors awarded: honors, high honors, or highest honors.
Graduation Criteria:
To be eligible for honors, students must also achieve a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.3 in all undergraduate coursework at the university by graduation. Failure to meet this criterion will result in the non-issuance of honors recognition.
Organizing an Honors Thesis Project
To initiate an Honors Thesis Project in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures (EALC), a student should follow these steps:
Choosing a Supervisor:
The student must approach and secure a faculty member from the EALC department to serve as the thesis supervisor. The faculty member should have expertise in the area of study the student wishes to explore.
Project Development:
Together, the student and the faculty supervisor will determine the topic, scope, and a detailed plan for research and writing of the thesis. This collaborative planning ensures the project is feasible and aligns with academic standards and goals.
Forming the Thesis Committee:
In consultation with the faculty supervisor, the student will identify and invite two additional faculty members to join the thesis committee. This should be completed by the beginning of the student’s final semester before graduation.
The committee members provide additional perspectives and expertise, contributing to a robust review and guidance process.
Registration and Support:
The student should consult with the Undergraduate Advisor to discuss the process for enrolling in the necessary thesis courses and to receive advice on getting started with the thesis project.
These steps are designed to ensure that the student is well-prepared and supported throughout the process of completing the honors thesis, leading to a meaningful and academically rigorous culmination of their studies in the EALC department.
Students with a strong interest in an area of study outside their major often decide to complete a minor program. These programs have set requirements.
General Guidelines
All minors must be declared before the first day of classes in your Expected Graduation Term (EGT). For summer graduates, minors must be declared prior to the first day of Summer Session A.
All upper-division courses must be taken for a letter grade.
A minimum of three of the upper-division courses taken to fulfill the minor requirements must be completed at UC Berkeley.
To fulfill the minor requirements, upper-division courses must have a minimum grade point average (GPA) of 2.0.
Courses that fulfill the minor requirements may be applied toward the Seven-Course Breadth requirement for Letters & Science students.
No more than one upper division course may be used to simultaneously fulfill requirements for a student's major and minor programs.
All minor requirements must be completed before the last day of finals during the semester the student plans to graduate. If students cannot finish all courses required for the minor by then, they should see a College of Letters & Science adviser.
All minor requirements must be completed within the unit ceiling. (Please see the College Requirements tab for further information regarding the unit ceiling.)
The prerequisite must be completed with a minimum grade of C or a Pass for Pass/Not Pass (letter grade not required).
The prerequisite may be taken at another college or university.
Equivalency—Students who have studied Chinese may satisfy this requirement by completing an advanced Chinese language course at UCB or a Chinese placement exam.
Undergraduate students must fulfill the following requirements in addition to those required by their major program.
For a detailed lists of L&S requirements, please see Overview tab to the right in this guide or visit the L&S Degree Requirements webpage. For College advising appointments, please visit the L&S Advising Pages.
All students who will enter the University of California as freshmen must demonstrate their command of the English language by fulfilling the Entry Level Writing requirement. Fulfillment of this requirement is also a prerequisite to enrollment in all reading and composition courses at UC Berkeley and must be taken for a letter grade.
The American History and American Institutions requirements are based on the principle that all U.S. residents who have graduated from an American university should have an understanding of the history and governmental institutions of the United States.
All undergraduate students at Cal need to take and pass this campus requirement course in order to graduate. The requirement offers an exciting intellectual environment centered on the study of race, ethnicity and culture of the United States. AC courses are plentiful and offer students opportunities to be part of research-led, highly accomplished teaching environments, grappling with the complexity of American Culture.
College of Letters & Science Essential Skills Requirements
The Quantitative Reasoning requirement is designed to ensure that students graduate with basic understanding and competency in math, statistics, or computer/data science. The requirement may be satisfied by exam or by taking an approved course taken for a letter grade.
The Foreign Language requirement may be satisfied by demonstrating proficiency in reading comprehension, writing, and conversation in a foreign language equivalent to the second semester college level, either by passing an exam or by completing approved course work taken for a letter grade.
In order to provide a solid foundation in reading, writing, and critical thinking the College of Letters and Science requires two semesters of lower division work in composition in sequence. Students must complete parts A & B reading and composition courses in sequential order by the end of their fourth semester for a letter grade.
College of Letters & Science 7 Course Breadth Requirements
The undergraduate breadth requirements provide Berkeley students with a rich and varied educational experience outside of their major program. As the foundation of a liberal arts education, breadth courses give students a view into the intellectual life of the University while introducing them to a multitude of perspectives and approaches to research and scholarship. Engaging students in new disciplines and with peers from other majors, the breadth experience strengthens interdisciplinary connections and context that prepares Berkeley graduates to understand and solve the complex issues of their day.
Unit Requirements
120 total units
Of the 120 units, 36 must be upper division units
Of the 36 upper division units, 6 must be taken in courses offered outside your major department
Residence Requirements
For units to be considered in "residence," you must be registered in courses on the Berkeley campus as a student in the College of Letters & Science. Most students automatically fulfill the residence requirement by attending classes at Cal for four years, or two years for transfer students. In general, there is no need to be concerned about this requirement, unless you graduate early, go abroad for a semester or year, or want to take courses at another institution or through UC Extension during your senior year. In these cases, you should make an appointment to meet an L&S College adviser to determine how you can meet the Senior Residence Requirement.
Note: Courses taken through UC Extension do not count toward residence.
Senior Residence Requirement
After you become a senior (with 90 semester units earned toward your B.A. degree), you must complete at least 24 of the remaining 30 units in residence in at least two semesters. To count as residence, a semester must consist of at least 6 passed units. Intercampus Visitor, EAP, and UC Berkeley-Washington Program (UCDC) units are excluded.
You may use a Berkeley Summer Session to satisfy one semester of the Senior Residence requirement, provided that you successfully complete 6 units of course work in the Summer Session and that you have been enrolled previously in the college.
Modified Senior Residence Requirement
Participants in the UC Education Abroad Program (EAP), Berkeley Summer Abroad, or the UC Berkeley Washington Program (UCDC) may meet a Modified Senior Residence requirement by completing 24 (excluding EAP) of their final 60 semester units in residence. At least 12 of these 24 units must be completed after you have completed 90 units.
Upper Division Residence Requirement
You must complete in residence a minimum of 18 units of upper division courses (excluding UCEAP units), 12 of which must satisfy the requirements for your major.
Major Map
Major maps are experience maps that help undergraduates plan their Berkeley journey based on intended major or field of interest. Featuring student opportunities and resources from your college and department as well as across campus, each map includes curated suggestions for planning your studies, engaging outside the classroom, and pursuing your career goals in a timeline format.
Use the major map below to explore potential paths and design your own unique undergraduate experience:
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Summer 2025 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2025
The course is designed for students who are of non-Chinese origin and were not raised in a Chinese-speaking environment; or who are of Chinese origin but do not speak Chinese and whose parents do not speak Chinese. The course develops beginning learners’ functional language ability—the ability to use Mandarin Chinese in linguistically and culturally appropriate ways at the beginning level. It helps students acquire communicative competence in Chinese while sensitizing them to the links between language and culture. Elementary Chinese: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 1A after taking Chinese 1.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 5 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 12 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2025
Chinese 1B (5 units) is designed for students who have successfully completed Chinese 1A or the equivalent. A good command of the Chinese phonetic system (pinyin) and knowledge of 300-400 Chinese characters are the prerequisites for this class. The class will continue to focus on training students in the four language skills-- listening, speaking, reading, and writing with a gradually increasing emphasis on translingual and transcultural competence. By the end of this semester, you are expected to reach the proficiency levels of intermediate low in the listening, speaking, reading, and writing four areas stated in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. Elementary Chinese: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 1A
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 1B after taking Chinese 1, Chinese 1X, or Chinese 1Y.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 12 hours of lecture and 0 hours of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
This course is designed specifically for Mandarin heritage students who possess speaking skill but little or no reading and writing skills in Chinese. The course utilizes students’ prior knowledge of listening and speaking skills to advance them to the intermediate Chinese proficiency level in one semester. Close attention is paid to meeting Mandarin heritage students’ literacy needs in meaningful contexts while introducing a functional vocabulary and a systematic review of structures through culturally related topics. The Hanyu Pinyin (a Chinese Romanization system) and traditional/simplified characters are introduced. Accelerated Elementary Chinese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Consent of instructor
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 1X after taking Chinese 1, Chinese 1B, or Chinese 1Y.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
The course is designed for students who have had exposure to a non-Mandarin Chinese dialect but cannot speak Mandarin and possess little or no reading and writing skills in Chinese. The course helps students gain a fundamental knowledge about Mandarin Chinese and explore their Chinese heritage culture through language. Students learn ways and discourse strategies to express themselves and develop their linguistic and cultural awareness in order to function appropriately in Mandarin-speaking environments. Elementary Chinese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Consent of instructor
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 1Y after taking Chinese 1, Chinese 1B, or Chinese 1X.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of lecture and 1 hour of laboratory per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
Elementary Cantonese 3A is designed for non-heritage learners with no prior knowledge of Cantonese, a regional variety of Chinese, introducing students to its use through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. Topics include meeting people, shopping, leisure activities, telling the time, discussing daily routines, describing people and family members, and transportation, and students will compose texts in Cantonese that show the relationship between language and culture. Finally, the course develops students’ awareness of socio-culturally situated language use and their ability to compare and negotiate similarities and differences between the target culture and their own culture. Elementary Cantonese: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Elementary Cantonese 3B is designed for non-heritage learners who have successfully completed 3A or equivalent. The course encourages students to construct meanings in oral, written and visual texts related to daily life topics such as locating things and places, food and clothing, weather, giving advice, telephone conversations, and arranging meetings, and to compose such texts. The course continues to develop students’ ability to understand the relationship between language and culture and to develop students’ awareness as to how social and cultural situations affect language use, encouraging students to explore multiple meanings and better understand the nature of their interpretations based on their attitudes, belief, and experiences. Elementary Cantonese: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 3A
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
Elementary Cantonese for Heritage Speakers 3X is designed for native and heritage Mandarin speakers. These students share the knowledge of standard Chinese writing system with Cantonese speakers. They have an interest in speaking Cantonese and learning a Chinese subculture shared among Cantonese speakers. This course will introduce students to its use through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. Topics include meeting people, shopping, leisure activities, telling the time, discussing daily routines, describing people and family members, transportation, and students will compose texts in Cantonese. Students will focus on vocabulary, linguistic knowledge, culture through expression analysis, and practical use of language. Elementary Cantonese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024
Elementary Taiwanese–Language, Culture, and Society in Taiwan (Chinese 4A) is designed to allow learners with no prior knowledge of the Chinese language to build familiarity with Taiwanese (or Southern Min), a variety of Chinese, through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. This is the first part of a two-semester sequence designed to equip students with the basic language skills needed in everyday life situations. There are no prerequisites for this course. The course uses various authentic materials and adopts a communicative approach to develop students’ awareness of socio-culturally situated language use and ability to compare and negotiate similarities and differences between the target culture and their own culture. Elementary Taiwanese: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2025
Elementary Taiwanese (Chinese 4B) is the second semester of a one-year sequence designed to allow learners with no prior knowledge of Chinese language to build familiarity with Taiwanese (or Southern Min), a regional variety of Chinese, through oral, written and visual texts related to daily life. This two-semester sequence is designed to equip students with the basic language skills needed in everyday life situations. The course aims to develop students’ awareness of socio-culturally situated language use along with their ability to compare and negotiate similarities and differences between the target culture and their own culture. Prerequisite: Chinese 4A or permission of instructor Elementary Taiwanese: Read More [+]
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
The first in a two-semester sequence, introducing students to Chinese literature in translation. In addition to literary sources, a wide range of philosophical and historical texts will be covered, as well as aspects of visual and material culture. 7A covers early China through late medieval China, up to and including the Yuan Dynasty (14th century); the course will also focus on the development of sound writing. Introduction to Premodern Chinese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2025, Spring 2024
The second of a two-semester sequence introducing students to Chinese literature in translation. In addition to literary sources, a wide range of philosophical and historical texts will be covered, as well as aspects of visual and material culture. 7B focuses on late imperial, modern, and contemporary China. The course will focus on the development of sound writing skills. Introduction to Modern Chinese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Summer 2025 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2025
The course is designed for students who are of non-Chinese origin and were not raised in a Chinese-speaking environment, or who are of Chinese origin but do not speak Chinese and whose parents do not speak Chinese. The course deals with lengthy conversations as well as narrative and descriptive texts in both simplified and traditional characters. It helps students to express themselves in speaking and writing on a range of topics and raises their awareness of the connection between language and culture to foster the development of communicative competence. Intermediate Chinese: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 1 or Chinese 1B; or consent of instructor
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 10A after taking Chinese 10, Chinese 10X, or Chinese 10Y.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 9 hours of lecture and 3 hours of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The course further develops students’ linguistic and cultural competence. In dealing with texts, students are guided to interpret, narrate, describe, and discuss topics ranging from real-life experience and personal memoire to historic events. Intercultural competence is promoted through linguistic and cultural awareness and language use in culturally appropriate contexts. Intermediate Chinese: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 10A; or consent of instructor
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 10B after taking Chinese 10, Chinese 10X, or Chinese 10Y.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 5 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 12 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
The course continues to develop students’ literacy and communicative competence through vocabulary and structure expansion dealing with topics related to Chinese heritage students’ personal experiences. Students are guided to express themselves on complex issues and to connect their language knowledge with real world experiences. Accelerated Intermediate Chinese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 1X; or consent of instructor
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 10X after taking Chinese 10, Chinese 10B, or Chinese 10Y.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025
Intermediate Cantonese (Chinese 30A) is designed for students who have completed Elementary Cantonese (Chinese 3A & 3B), and/or learners who can hold basic conversations on daily topics but want to expand their vocabulary size and hope to complete more demanding linguistic tasks such as elaborating opinions, narrating in more details, participating in discussions, presenting an argument, etc. Students will develop their language and cultural competence through oral, written, and visual texts related to Cantonese-speaking communities in the U.S and/or Hong Kong. Some topics covered in the course may include food culture, health, job hunting, academic goals, safety, volunteering, technology, art and music. Intermediate Cantonese: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Going beyond satisfying basic communicative needs, students would learn to use Cantonese to complete more complicated tasks such as elaborating, comparing, analyzing, defending, debating, etc. Students would be frequently exposed to discussions regarding broader societal issues such as housing, food culture, fashion, safety, recreation, education, etc. Assuming basic competence of Cantonese, the course attempts to relate the learners to Chinese subculture through analyzing the link between Cantonese expressions and societal phenomenon in the Cantonese speaking society. Difference between Cantonese and Mandarin expressions and its cultural implications, as well as the social position of Cantonese globally and regionally. Intermediate Cantonese for Heritage Speakers: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2020
This course examines the complex worldviews of China’s Han period, the centuries that follow its unification and the establishment of its empire. The momentous changes of this period shaped traditional and contemporary views of history and society, philosophy, and religion, and as a result are still relevant today. This course will look at Han “thought,” a word chosen for its range, including religion, state ritual, social conventions, moral philosophy, and thinking about the natural world. It covers both elite and popular culture, and pays particular attention to two works of the second century B.C.E.: the Shiji (i.e., Records of the Historian) or the Huainanzi. Chinese Thought in the Han Dynasty: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
The course takes students to a higher level of competence in Chinese language and culture and develops students’ critical linguistic and cultural awareness. It surveys social issues and values on more abstract topics in a changing China. Through the development of discourse and cultural knowledge in spoken and written Chinese, students learn to interpret subtle textual meanings in texts and contexts as well as reflect on the world and themselves and express themselves using a variety of genres. Advanced Chinese: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 10 or Chinese 10B
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 100A after completing Chinese 100 or Chinese 100XA or Chinese 100YA.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 5 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The course continues the development of critical awareness by emphasizing the link between socio-cultural literacy and a higher level of language competence. While continuing to expand their critical literacy skills, students interpret texts related to Chinese popular culture, social change, cultural traditions, politics and history. Through linguistic and cultural comparisons, students understand more about people in the target society and themselves as well as about the power of language in language use to enhance their competence in operating between languages and associated cultures. Advanced Chinese: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 100A
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 100B after taking Chinese 100 or Chinese 100XB.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 5 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
This course advances students’ linguistic and cultural competence through the development of critical literacy skills. It guides students to become more sophisticated language users equipped with linguistic, pragmatic, and textual knowledge in discussions, reading, writing, and translation. Students reflect on the world and themselves through the lens of the target language and culture and become more competent in operating between English and Chinese and between American culture and Chinese culture. Students learn to recognize a second version of Chinese characters. Advanced Chinese for Heritage Learners: Read More [+]
Objectives & Outcomes
Course Objectives: Chinese 100XA advances Chinese heritage language learners’ linguistic and intercultural competence. The course guides students to examine and interpret texts dealing with the lifestyles and beliefs of Chinese and American people, their past memories and pertinent political, economic, and social issues. In addition to comprehending text information, students learn how meanings are constructed through linguistic forms in social-cultural and historical contexts and understand how the world is perceived and conceived differently through language.
The course helps students to expand their literacy from topics about daily routines to more intellectually and linguistically challenging issues, from an informal speaking and writing style to a more formal style, as well as from one version of orthography to a second one (from simplified to traditional characters or vice versa).
Student Learning Outcomes: Students learn to use the target language to comprehend and interpret texts, to compare and contrast frames of reference, and to discuss and present major social, political, and economic issues.
Through this course, Chinese heritage language learners become more sophisticated language users equipped with linguistic, pragmatic, and textual knowledge in discussions, reading, writing, and carrying out translation. By reflecting on the world and themselves through the lens of the Chinese language and culture, they become more competent in shifting between English and Chinese and between American culture and Chinese culture.
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Placement evaluation result equivalent to C100XA or continuing student from C10X/Y; or consent of instructor
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 100XA after taking Chinese 100, Chinese 100A, or Chinese 100YA.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Advanced Chinese 100XB is designed for Chinese heritage language learners who have taken Chinese 100XA or an equivalent level of Chinese. It further develops students’ linguistic and intercultural competence through working with texts that deal with cross-strait relations, Chinese people’s style of living, their changing lifestyles and mindsets as well as with migrant workers who have been deeply involved in the economic reforms that have taken place in mainland China. The texts also include a survey of China’s modernization in its early modern times and as well three historical figures from this period. Advanced Chinese for Heritage Learners: Read More [+]
Objectives & Outcomes
Course Objectives: The course focuses on linguistic, cognitive, and social dimensions of language use in an integrated way and prepares students to interpret language use in multiple contexts. Attention is paid to the relationships among particular text types and purposes and the particular conventions of reading and writing in various contexts. It deals with discourse and not only provides students with structured guidance in the thinking that goes into reading, writing, and speaking appropriately for particular contexts, but it also encourages learners to take an active and critical stance to the discourse conventions and to construct meanings.
Student Learning Outcomes: The development of critical literacy enables students to understand more about people, culture, and history in the target society and themselves as well as about the power of language and to enhance their translingual and transcultural competence in intercultural communication.
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Placement evaluation result equivalent to C100XB or continuing student from C100XA; or consent of instructor
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 100XB after taking Chinese 100, Chinese 100B, or Chinese 100BY.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The course is designed to assist students to reach the advanced-mid level on language skills and to enhance their intercultural competence. Students read the works of famous Chinese writers. Movie adaptations of these writings are also used. In addition to reading and seeking out information, students experience readings by interpreting and constructing meanings and evaluate the effect of the language form choice. Fourth-Year Chinese Readings: Literature: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 100B or Chinese 100XB; or consent of instructor
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
The course is designed to further develop students’ advanced-mid level language proficiency and intercultural competence. It uses authentic readings on Chinese social, political, and journalistic issues, supplemented by newspaper articles. To develop students’ self-learning abilities and help them to link the target language to their real world experience, students’ agency in learning is promoted through critical reading and rewriting and through comparing linguistic and cultural differences. Fourth-Year Chinese Readings: Social Sciences and History: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 100B or Chinese 100XB; or consent of instructor
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
The first half of a one-year introductory course in literary Chinese, introducing key features of grammar, syntax, and usage, along with the intensive study of a set of readings in the language. Readings are drawn from a variety of pre-Han and Han-Dynasty sources. Introduction to Literary Chinese: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 10, 10B, 10X, or 10Y is recommended but not required
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 110A after taking Chinese 110 or Chinese 110B.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The second half of a one-year introductory course in literary Chinese, continuing the topics from the first semester, and giving basic coverage of relevant issues in the history of the language and writing system. The use of basic reference sources is introduced. Introduction to Literary Chinese: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 110A
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for Chinese 110B after taking Chinese 110.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
This fast-paced course improves students’ abilities to use advanced language forms to read and discuss a wide range of abstract subjects and issues. This includes literature, philosophy, law, economics, history, cross-Strait relations, geography, and movie criticism. The course also develops students’ ability to read articles that contain both formal and informal and modern and classic Chinese usages. Students learn to identify and explain the classical Chinese allusions used in the articles and compare them to their modern counterparts. Students use the Chinese language in their fields of study and are directed to write a professional paper in their academic field. Fifth-Year Readings: Reading and Analysis of Advanced Chinese Texts: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 101 or Chinese 102; and consent of instructor
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2019
This course is an introduction to the history of Buddhism in China from its beginnings in the early centuries CE to the present day. Through engagement with historical scholarship, primary sources in translation, and Chinese Buddhist art, we will explore the intellectual history and cultural impact of Buddhism in China. Students will also be introduced to major issues in the institutional history of Buddhism, the interactions between Buddhism and indigenous Chinese religions, and the relationship between Buddhism and the state. Previous study of Buddhism is helpful but not required. Buddhism in China: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2020
Modern Chinese Buddhism emerged from a variety of reactions to the challenges posed by modernity. The course aims at introducing students to the ways in which Buddhists in China have engaged and continue to engage with a modern society and a globalized world. The course will follow the trends of Chinese Buddhism from the early twentieth century down to the most recent developments in the present. In exploring modern constructions of Buddhism in China, we will distinguish between modernism and modernity, and investigate how Chinese Buddhists introduced reforms and innovations, while also attempting to maintain continuity with traditional ideals and modes of practice. Buddhism in Modern China: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2012, Fall 2006, Fall 2004
Readings in historical, religious, and philosophical texts of the Zhou, Han, and later periods from both printed and manuscript sources. Ancient Chinese Prose: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 110A
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2016, Spring 2014, Fall 2007
Readings from the Shijing (book of Odes), the Chuci (song of Chu), and selections from other early compilations of poetry. Ancient Chinese Poetry: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 110A
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2019, Fall 2016, Spring 2015
Readings in printed and manuscript sources that relate to early Chinese popular religion, the Celestial Masters tradition, medieval Daoist revelations (e.g., Shangqing and Lingbao texts), Daoism and the state, interactions with other traditions, liturgy, alchemy, drama, and modern Daoist practices in China and the diaspora. Topics in Daoism: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2023, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 Second 6 Week Session
Introduction to the forms and subtypes of classical poetry, focusing on both learning to read poems in the original as well as developing the critical and analytical tools to discuss and respond to them in an informed way. Readings in Classical Chinese Poetry: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 110B; or consent of instructor
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit with instructor consent.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2013, Spring 2013
Thematic focus and range of readings will vary. The course will deal with readings from one or more genres of classical Chinese prose, such as essays, epigraphical materials, historical works, classical tales, administrative documents, scholars' notes, geographical treatises, or travel diaries. Readings in Medieval Prose: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 110B; or consent of instructor
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit with instructor consent.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Spring 2016
This course is an introduction to the study of medieval Buddhist literature written in classical Chinese. We will read samples from a variety of genres, including early Chinese translations of Sanskrit and Central Asian Buddhist scriptures, indigenous Chinese commentaries, philosophical treatises, and sectarian works, including Chan (Zen koans). The course will also serve as an introduction to resource materials used in the study of Chinese Buddhist texts, and students will be expected to make use of a variety of reference tools in preparation for class. Readings in Chinese will be supplemented by a range of secondary readings in English on Mahayana doctrine and Chinese Buddhist history. Readings in Chinese Buddhist Texts: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 110A; or one semester of classical Chinese. Prior background in Buddhist history and thought is helpful, but not required
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2020
This course is an intensive introduction to Taiwanese literature and media culture. Reading Taiwan: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 100A or Chinese 100XA (may be taken concurrently)
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2019
This course will introduce students to selected works of modern Chinese literature produced in the first half of the 20th century, as well as their cultural and historical context. How did writers such as Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, and others attempt to make themselves "at home" in a world profoundly dislocated by the forces of colonialism, war, and revolution? We will examine the politics of literary style, questions of nationalism, representations of gender, and the problem of colonial modernity in these texts. All primary texts are presented in the original Chinese, supplemented by critical and biographical articles in English. Modern Chinese Literature: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 100A or Chinese 100XA (may be taken concurrently)
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2018
This course explores popular, realist, and avant-garde literature from mainland China and Taiwan since 1949. We will consider how writers have engaged with the cultural dislocations of modernity by exploring questions such as the presentation of cultural and gender identities and the politics of memory and place. Central to our discussion will be the problem of how literature not only reflects but also critically engages with historical and cultural experience through a variety of genres. A crucial aspect of this course will be the development of skills in close, critical, and historically contextualized reading. Contemporary Chinese Literature: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 100A or Chinese 100XA (may be taken concurrently)
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2017, Fall 2015
Chinese cities are the sites of complicated global/local interconnections as the nation is increasingly incorporated into the world system. Understanding Chinese cities is the key to analyzing the dramatic transformation of Chinese society and culture. This course is designed to teach students to think about Chinese cities in more textured ways. How are urban forms and urban spaces produced through processes of social, political, and ideological conflict? How are cities represented in literary, cinematic, and various popular cultures? How has our imagination of the city been shaped and how are these spatial discourses influencing the making of the cities of tomorrow? Reading Chinese Cities: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 100A or Chinese 100XA (may be taken concurrently)
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2009, Fall 2005
This course explores one of the most central and potent areas of cultural politics in modern China: the city and its relations to the countryside. We will explore how urban space and native soil became central places of imagination and desire in modernity; how Beijing and Shanghai become mediums of imagining differing meanings of "modernity" and "tradition," "Chinese" and "Western," and cultural authenticity; the repeated reformist and revolutionary desire to return from the city back to the countryside; as well as more recent mass migrations from the countryside during a time of (and as part of) drastic urban destruction and "renewal." Cities and the Country: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Chinese 100A or Chinese 100XA (may be taken concurrently)
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2020
This course introduces Chinese language cinema since the late 1970s. Depending on the semester, the class will either focus on the distinct new waves in the three regions of Mainland, Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or cover all three regions to examine to what extent these “New Cinemas” share similar concerns on questions of gender, politics, remembrance, and urbanization. Contemporary Chinese Language Cinema: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2020, Spring 2014
Ideals of good governance are a core concern of many brands of traditional Chinese thought. The image of the ruler whose authority is exercised in harmony with the desires and interests of the society at large plays a key role not only in theories of governance but also in thought about ethics and psychology. There is also a fascination with the bad ruler. In addition to serving as negative examples just as good rulers serve as positive examples, bad rulers also provide an imaginative space for thinking about extremes of human will, offering an outlet for fantasy and vicarious gratification of desires that normally remain taboo. Bad Emperors: Fantasies of Sovereignty and Transgression in the Chinese Tradition: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2017, Fall 2015
This course introduces the history of traditional Chinese drama from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, covering important works from a wide range of genres (farcical, religious, detective, martial arts, historical, and romantic). We study Chinese theater in the context of pleasure precincts, ad hoc markets, ritual parades, and printed matter. The underlying questions we ask are: how did different kinds of spatial structure historically define performance? And how did these varied spatial configurations orient the relationship of the audience to the performance differently? And what general implications did the theatrical space have for the constitution of the self and for social formation in medieval and early modern China? Traditional Chinese Drama: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2022
Vernacular fiction in late imperial China emerged at the margins of official historiography, traveled through oral storytelling, and reached sophistication in the hands of literati. Covering the major genres and masterpieces of traditional Chinese novels including military, martial arts, libertine, and romantic stories, this course investigates how shifting boundaries brought about significant transformations of Chinese narrative at the levels of both form and content. Exploring Premodern Chinese Novels: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022, Spring 2020
This course centers around intensive reading and analysis of Cao Xueqin’s 18th-century masterpiece of Chinese fiction (also known as the Dream of the Red Chamber). Students will be introduced to the literary, cultural, philosophical, and material world from which this work emerged, as well as various approaches to the world within the text. The Story of the Stone: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Credit Restrictions: Students will receive no credit for CHINESE 180 after completing CHINESE 80.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3-3 hours of lecture and 0-1 hours of discussion per week
Summer: 8 weeks - 6 hours of lecture and 0 hours of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
This course examines the development of Confucianism in pre-modern China using a dialogical model that emphasizes its interactions with competing viewpoints. Particular attention will be paid to ritual, conceptions of human nature, ethics, and to the way that varieties of Confucianism were rooted in more general theories of value. Confucius and His Interpreters: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week 10 weeks - 5 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021
This course is an introduction to media culture in 20th-century China, with an emphasis on photography, cinema, and popular music. The course places these productions in historical and cultural context, examining the complex intertwinement of culture, technology, and politics in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan from the turn of the last century to the beginning of the 21st. Students will also be introduced to a number of approaches to thinking about and analyzing popular cultural phenomena. Popular Media in Modern China: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2019, Spring 2010, Fall 2008
What do landscapes "do"? How do landscape images and travel narratives mediate experiences of land, nature, and other peoples? How do landscapes map one's place in the world, shaping both cultural identities and real geographic spaces? Can landscapes travel? This course explores such questions by examining one of the world's longest-running traditions of landscape representation. We will consider such landscape genres as poetry, prose description, fiction, travel narrative, maps, painting, and photography, and consider their work across China's long history of imperial expansion, colonization, and globalization. We will also consider China's places in thinking about landscape and travel in the West. Chinese Landscapes: Space, Place, and Travel: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: One previous course in literature or cultural studies
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in East Asian Languages (for description of Honors Program, see Index). Honors Course: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Senior honors standing in East Asian Languages, 3.5 GPA in major, 3.3 overall
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 0 hours of independent study per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. This is part one of a year long series course. A provisional grade of IP (in progress) will be applied and later replaced with the final grade after completing part two of the series. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022, Spring 2018
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in East Asian Languages (for description of Honors Program, see Index). Honors Course: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Senior honors standing in East Asian Languages, 3.5 major GPA, 3.3 overall
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 0 hours of independent study per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Chinese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. This is part two of a year long series course. Upon completion, the final grade will be applied to both parts of the series. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Summer 2025 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2025, Fall 2024
The arts of reading a text, summarizing its argument, questioning its suppositions, generating balanced opinions, and expressing those opinions with clarity and effectiveness lie at the center of university life and educated human endeavor. EA Lang R1B is designed to help inculcate those skills, paying particular attention to East Asian humanistic topics. This four-unit course focuses on how to formulate questions and hone observations into well reasoned, coherent, and convincing essays. Attention will be paid to the basic rules of grammar, logical construction, compelling rhetorical approaches, research techniques, library and database skills, and forms of citation. Reading and Composition on topics in East Asian Humanities: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Previously passed an R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Previously passed an articulated R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Score a 4 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Literature and Composition. Score a 4 or 5 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Language and Composition. Score of 5, 6, or 7 on the International Baccalaureate Higher Level Examination in English
Requirements this course satisfies: Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Spring 2024
The Freshman Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small seminar setting. Freshman seminars are offered in all campus departments and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to fifteen freshmen. Freshman Seminar: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 5 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week 6 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week 8 weeks - 2 hours of lecture per week 10 weeks - 1.5 hours of lecture per week 15 weeks - 1 hour of seminar per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: The grading option will be decided by the instructor when the class is offered. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
This introduction to the study of Buddhism will consider materials drawn from various Buddhist traditions of Asia, from ancient times down to the present day. However, the course is not intended to be a comprehensive or systematic survey; rather than aiming at breadth, the course is designed around key themes such as ritual, image veneration, mysticism, meditation, and death. The overarching emphasis throughout the course will be on the hermeneutic difficulties attendant upon the study of religion in general, and Buddhism in particular. Introduction to the Study of Buddhism: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2019, Spring 2018, Fall 2012
Sophomore seminars are small interactive courses offered by faculty members in departments all across the campus. Sophomore seminars offer opportunity for close, regular intellectual contact between faculty members and students in the crucial second year. The topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to 15 sophomores. Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: At discretion of instructor
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 5 weeks - 3-6 hours of seminar per week 10 weeks - 1.5-3 hours of seminar per week 15 weeks - 1-2 hours of seminar per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 2.5-5 hours of seminar per week 8 weeks - 2-4 hours of seminar per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: The grading option will be decided by the instructor when the class is offered. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Summer 2015 First 6 Week Session
This course will examine comparative responses to and representations of violent conflict. We will pay attention to how catastrophic events are productive of new forms of expression--oral, written, and visual--as well as destructive of familiar ones. We will examine the ways in which experience and its representation interact during and in the aftermath of extreme violence. Our empirical cases will be drawn from our research on responses to WWII atrocities, and on the post-Cold War civil wars in Africa. Catastrophe, Memory, and Narrative: Comparative Responses to Atrocity in the Twentieth Century: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Summer 2020 First 6 Week Session, Fall 2019, Summer 2019 Second 6 Week Session
This course explores representation of romantic love in East Asian cultures in premodern and post-modern contexts. Students develop a better understanding of the similarities and differences in traditional values in three East Asian cultures by comparing how canonical texts of premodern China, Japan and Korea represent romantic relationship. This is followed by the study of several contemporary East Asian films, giving the student the opportunity to explore how traditional values persist, change, or become nexus points of resistance. Dynamics of Romantic Core Values in East Asian Premodern Literature and Contemporary Film: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2012, Spring 2010
This course will explore how the Chinese and English-language literary traditions (broadly defined) delineate the realm of the ineffable, and how cultural notions of the inexpressible shape the writing and reading of poems, songs, and a selection of prose pieces, from the uses of figurative language and prosody to genre and canon formation. In addition, in order to deepen our understanding of how writing achieves its aims, some attention will be given to nonverbal modes of expression, including calligraphy and painting--and attempts to render them in writing. Over this course of study, students will not only refine their sensitivity to the power of artistic modes of indirection, but will also hone their skills in close reading, analytical writing, and oral expression. All readings will be in English. Expressing the Ineffable in China and Beyond: The Making of Meaning in Poetic Writing: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2013, Fall 2008
This course will examine war, empire, and the writing and memorialization of history through an eclectic group of literary, graphic, and cinematic texts from China, Japan, Europe, and the U.S. War, Empire, and Literature in East Asia: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2006, Spring 2006
This course will explore poetic translation, across languages, across cultures, and across historical ages, not merely from the perspective of the "accuracy" with which a classic text is represented in the translation, but as a window into the nature of poetic tradition and poetic writing itself. Works will be primarily drawn from the Chinese tradition, but in the interest of allowing a comparative discussion of the course's central themes, a significant amount of reading from ancient and modern Greek poetry will be included as well. The goal of the class is not simply to gain familiarity with Chinese poetry and poets, but more fundamentally to gain skill and sophistication in reading, responding to, and thinking about poetry. Revising the Classics: Chinese and Greek Poetry in Translation: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2020, Spring 2019
In this course we compare the cultural traditions of tea in China and Japan. In addition, using tea as the case study, we analyze the mechanics of the flow of culture across both national boundaries and social practices (such as between poetry and the tea ceremony). Understanding the tea culture of these countries informs students of important and enduring aspects of both cultures, provides an opportunity to discuss the role of religion and art in social practice, provides a forum for cultural comparison, and provides as well an example of the relationship between the two countries and Japanese methods of importing and naturalizing another country's social practice. Korean tea traditions are also briefly considered. History of the Culture of Tea in China and Japan: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2020, Spring 2017
This course will explore some of the most difficult bioethical issues confronting the world today from the perspective of traditional values embedded in the cultural history of India, China, and Japan as evidenced in their religions, legal codes, and political history. Possible topics include population control, abortion, sex-selection, euthanasia, suicide, genetic manipulation, brain-death, and organ transplants. Bioethics in Asian Thought and Culture: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2016
This class examines the global dynamics and local distinction of literary writings from contemporary East Asia. Beginning with the colonial connections among Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul during the 1920s-1940s, and moving on to texts composed since 2000 in Manila, Hong Kong, India and elsewhere, the course considers how literary writers have grappled with an increasingly integrated global marketplace in which culture, ideas and people circulate alongside (and as) capital. Discussions will reflect on the confluence of culture and politics in literary writings that treat race tension, ecological crisis, capitalist catastrophe and other themes. Primary readings will be supplemented by iconic essays of cultural criticism and recent films. Reading Global Politics in Contemporary East Asian Literature: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2017, Spring 2014
The 1960s were a time of historical transformation and upheaval in East Asia. It saw the overthrow of political regimes, the consolidation of communism, unprecedented capitalist expansion, and the emergence of new technologies that affected aesthetic production and consumption. This course explores the multiple aspects of culture, aesthetics, and politics that defined this moment. It asks how and why we can define the 1960s as a period, while considering the significance of defining East Asia (a term which denotes an imagined space of relations) as a particular region at this time. The East Asian Sixties: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2018, Fall 2017
The course will introduce students to narratives about illness, disease and healing written by patients, physicians, caretakers, and others. These narratives report an experience. They reveal the interactions between the unfolding life of the patient and the shifting social meanings attached to illness. We will study the relationships between illness and society through readings of fiction, memoir, films, essays and graphic novels in order to understand how these varied forms of storytelling organize and give meaning to crucial questions about embodiment, disability and emergent forms of sociality enabled by our bodily vulnerabilities. Illness Narratives, Vulnerable Bodies: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2022, Spring 2017
What does it mean to use the medium of writing to “know” a person, and precisely how does one avail oneself of that medium to make oneself—or someone else— “known”? This course will guide students in writing about one of the most challenging of subjects: people. Students will have the opportunity to (a) read deeply in a selection of writings drawn from a range of genres and cultures, to acquaint themselves with a range of rhetorical tools employed in the portrayal of human lives and character, (b) identify the aims of their own writings, and (c) develop competency in applying what they have learned as readers to their own writing. Knowing Others, and Being Known: The Art of Writing People: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2017
Comparative analysis of modern literature from China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan), Korea, and Japan with an emphasis on the short story and the novel. We will think about both the specificities of the literatures of the region as well as shared and interconnected experiences of modernity that broadly connect the cultures of East Asia during the twentieth century. Thematic concerns will include: modernism and modernity; nostalgia and homesickness; empire and its aftermath; and the cultures of globalization. Modern East Asian Fiction: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2018
This course provides a forum for reading and discussing East Asia’s greatest and most iconic modern writers, Lu Xun. We will closely read Lu Xun’s major works , discuss his role in the reinvention of the Chinese language and literary tradition, explore the global literary and intellectual currents with which he was deeply engaged, as well as situating him within the tumultuous era of colonialism, modernization, and revolution. All readings will be available in English translation. Lu Xun and his Worlds: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2021
This course explores Chinese cultures of sex and gender from antiquity to the seventeenth century. We concentrate on three interconnected issues: women’s status, homoeroticism, and the human body. Our discussion will be informed by cross-cultural comparisons with ancient Greece, Renaissance England, and Contemporary America. In contrast to our modern regime of sexuality, which collapses all the three aforementioned issues into the issues of desire and identity intrinsic to the body, we will see how the early Chinese regime of sexual act evolved into the early modern regime of emotion that concerned less inherent identities than a media culture of life-style performance. Sex and Gender in Premodern Chinese Culture: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
Higher Learning begins with the study of heaven. As the source of orientation in space and time, heaven provides humanity the foundation for its knowledge and political order. To understand what knowledge is or how politics function, we need a basic understanding of the ways of heaven. This course examines the function heaven serves in the founding of order against the void in nature through the formation of conventional systems of time and space and the role heaven has played in the promulgation of governments. From a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary perspective that covers the course of Eurasian history and using primary sources in translation, we will see heaven unfold through the developments that leave us with the world we know today. The History of Heaven: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course will discuss the social, economic, and cultural aspects of Buddhism as it moved along the ancient Eurasian trading network referred to as the “Silk Road”. Instead of relying solely on textual sources, the course will focus on material culture as it offers evidence concerning the spread of Buddhism. Through an examination of the Buddhist archaeological remains of the Silk Road, the course will address specific topics, such as the symbiotic relationship between Buddhism and commerce; doctrinal divergence; ideological shifts in the iconography of the Buddha; patronage (royal, religious and lay); Buddhism and political power; and art and conversion. All readings will be in English. Buddhism on the Silk Road: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2021
How far can we go into the minds and bodies of others? How strongly can we sense their presence? When, and why, do we hit a wall separating us from the world beyond us? In this course we will experiment, through a number of genres and media, with the art of writing (and thinking and feeling) empathetically. These genres and media include diary, fiction, poetry, editorial, letter writing, reportage, description (of nature, art, emotions, psychic states, etc.), film, video, and photography. The Art of Writing: Writing the Limits of Empathy: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2011, Fall 2009, Spring 2008
A thematic course on Buddhist perspectives on nature and Buddhist responses to environmental issues. The first half of the course focuses on East Asian Buddhist cosmological and doctrinal perspectives on the place of the human in nature and the relationship between the salvific goals of Buddhism and nature. The second half of the course examines Buddhist ethics, economics, and activism in relation to environmental issues in contemporary Southeast Asia, East Asia, and America. Buddhism and the Environment: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: One lower-division course in Buddhist Studies or consent of instructor
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
A study of the Buddhist tradition as it is found today in Asia. The course will focus on specific living traditions of East, South, and/or Southeast Asia. Themes to be addressed may include contemporary Buddhist ritual practices; funerary and mortuary customs; the relationship between Buddhism and other local religious traditions; the relationship between Buddhist institutions and the state; Buddhist monasticism and its relationship to the laity; Buddhist ethics; Buddhist "modernism," and so on. Buddhism in Contemporary Society: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2013, Spring 2010
This course will introduce students to the Zen Buddhist traditions of China and Japan, drawing on a variety of disciplinary perspectives (history, anthropology, philosophy, and so on). The course will also explore a range of hermeneutic problems (problems involved in interpretation) entailed in understanding a sophisticated religious tradition that emerged in a time and culture very different from our own. Zen Buddhism: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: One lower division course in Asian religion recommended
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3-3 hours of lecture and 0-1 hours of discussion per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2019, Fall 2017
This course will discuss the historical development of the Pure Land school of East Asian Buddhism, the largest form of Buddhism practiced today in China and Japan. The curriculum is divided into India, China, and Japan sections, with the second half of the course focusing exclusively on Japan where this form of religious culture blossomed most dramatically, covering the ancient, medieval, and modern periods. The curriculum will begin with a reading of the core scriptures that form the basis of the belief system and then move into areas of cultural expression. The course will follow two basic trajectories over the centuries: doctrine/philosophy and culture/society. Pure Land Buddhism: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required, with common exam group.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2020
This course offers a cultural history of encounters between Russia and Asia in literature, film and visual art. The lenses of Orientalism, Eurasianism and Internationalism will be used to analyze Russian interactions with three spaces: the Caucasus, Central Asia, and East Asia. We will discuss works by classic Russian writers and artists (including Tolstoy, Blok and Platonov) that address the question of Russia’s engagement with Asia and consider Russia’s ambiguous spatial identity between Europe and Asia. We will also examine responses to Russian culture and the Russian/Soviet state in the literature and culture of China (Lu Xun, Xiao Hong), Japan (Kurosawa), Central Asia (Aitmatov) and the Caucasus (Sadulaev). All readings in English. Russia and Asia: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Spring 2013, Spring 2010
The emergence of the tantras in seventh and eighth-century India marked a watershed for religious practice throughout Asia. These esoteric scriptures introduced complex new ritual technologies that transformed the religious traditions of India, from Brahmanism to Jainism and Buddhism, as well as those of Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, and Japan. This course provides an overview of tantric religion across these regions. Tantric Traditions of Asia: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2021
Through the prism of psychoanalytical theories, early and contemporary, this course explores a variety of pre-modern and modern East Asian texts—literary, artistic, religious, and theoretical. We will be asking both how these theories enrich our reading of the texts, and how the texts enrich our understanding of the theories. Through close readings of all the material we will begin to discern how theory and text reshape one another, where they mesh productively, and where they insistently stay apart. Topics include: the unconscious, selfhood, repression, attachment, beauty, dreams, ritual, ghosts and haunting, madness, meditative states, mystical experience, mourning, healing, therapeutic method and cure. No prerequisites.
Terms offered: Fall 2025
We commonly understand things-- both things available to our senses and “mental objects"--by imposing a system of meaning on them. Aesthetic thinking demands we grapple with what an object means based on our engagement or confrontation with the object, rather than through a theory or pre-conceived idea.
This class offers an exploration of (and a training in) our aesthetic relationship to things (written, visual and musical) in the world—things made by people worthy of close attention (works of art and human thought, including literature, visual arts, music, dance, and philosophy), and things in the world not wholly made by us but inspire human attention (including nature).
The objects will come from East Asia and elsewhere around the globe. Form and Formlessness: Practices and Theories of Meaning: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course studies the purview of astral science under Buddhist dominion. Here it is at once promoted for promulgating Buddhist world order and repudiated for begetting the suffering-inducing physical universe, a warped vessel of ceaselessly turning stars that the Buddhist dharma must transcend. The course begins with the part astral science plays in genesis, the creation of Buddhist world order. It then covers the science’s central aspects, celestial systems, spatial orientation, time reckoning, the making of a calendar, and publication of an almanac. Thereafter, it treats the science’s outgrowth into interrelated forms of Buddhist propaganda manifest as divination, magic, medicine, ritual, scripture, and iconography.
Terms offered: Summer 2025 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2023 Second 6 Week Session
This course investigates how neurotypical and neurodivergent authors (those with neurological conditions) depict and discuss "neurodiversity". We pay particular attention to how the autistic community embraces this idea. The course emphasizes two Japanese authors, Oe Kenzaburô and autistic author Higashida Naoki (both read in English). We also read other fiction and poetry dealing with themes of autism. To better contextualize the Japanese authors, we read nonfiction work on neurodiversity as well. Taking a comparative, cross-cultural approach brings into relief the ways in which neurodiversity is understood, depicted, and expressed; and the unique difficulties with representation. Satisfies Arts & Letters (AL) breadth requirements. Neurodiversity in Literature: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course comprises an immersive survey of science fiction - historically the only literary genre fully devoted to imagining the alterity of the future - as it takes on a unique and pressing relevance in contemporary East Asian culture and society. Providing students with both comprehensive training in literary analysis and critical thinking as well as a substantive sociohistorical introduction to contemporary East Asian societies and politics, the course will constitute a solid foundation for the East Asian humanities major. All readings will be in English; no prior knowledge of Asian languages and/or cultures expected.
Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2020
Prehistoric and protohistoric archaeology in China, Japan, and Korea. Archaeology of East Asia: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
The study of East Asian films as categorized either by industry-identified genres (westerns, horror films, musicals, film noir, etc.) or broader interpretive modes (melodrama, realism, fantasy, etc). East Asian Film: Special Topics in Genre: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Summer: 6 weeks - 8 hours of lecture and 2 hours of discussion per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course is a capstone experience that centers on the philosophies and religions of East Asia examined from multiple theoretical perspectives. It comprises several thematic units within which a short set of readings about theory are followed by chronologically arranged readings about East Asia. Themes will alternate from year to year but may include: ritual and performance studies; religion and evolution; definitions of religion and theories of its origins; and the role of sacrifice. Tools and Methods in the Study of East Asian Philosophy and Religion: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Preference will be given to majors, especially those with junior or senior standing
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in the East Asian Religion, Thought, and Culture major (for description of Honors Program, see Index). Honors Course: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Senior honors standing in the East Asian Religion, Thought, and Culture major, 3.5 GPA in major, 3.3 overall
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 2-5 hours of independent study per week
Summer: 10 weeks - 3-7.5 hours of independent study per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. This is part one of a year long series course. A provisional grade of IP (in progress) will be applied and later replaced with the final grade after completing part two of the series. Final exam not required.
Terms offered: Fall 2023
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in the East Asian Religion, Thought, and Culture major (for description of Honors Program, see Index). Honors Course: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Senior honors standing in the East Asian Religion, Thought, and Culture major, 3.5 major GPA, 3.3 overall
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 2-5 hours of independent study per week
Summer: 10 weeks - 3-7.5 hours of independent study per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: East Asian Languages and Cultures/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. This is part two of a year long series course. Upon completion, the final grade will be applied to both parts of the series. Final exam not required.
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