Asian Studies

This course explores contemporary Korean literature. The course looks at the social and cultural environment in which the texts were produced and to which they respond. Students gain a critical point of view concerning the past, present and the future narratives. Analyzing contemporary Korean literature and sharing your opinions and feelings with other students through various activities, they experience the immense power of Korean literature.

A literary and philosophical inquiry into such themes as selfhood, nothingness, name, namelessness, reality, Karma, yin-yang, and so forth through examination of great literary and philosophical writings in the East Asian tradition. All works are read in English translation. Topics covered include: Taoist thought and literature, Confucian thought and literature, Buddhist literature, the origins of East Asian thought, search for cultural archetypes, Confucian ideology in crisis, and modernity in modern Korean and Chinese fiction.

This course introduces Korean literature in English translation and explores the relationship between Korean literature and world literature. The first half of the semester is devoted to pre-modern texts, including prose fiction, essays, and poems with an emphasis on Buddhism and Confucianism. The second half of the course examines short stories and poems of the 1920's through the 1980's against the backdrop of the Japanese colonization and the Korean War.

This course provides a broad introduction to the major themes and trends in Korean and English-language historiography of Korean history from antiquity to the modern era. Students examine various issues, events, and individuals in Korea's political, social, economic and diplomatic history. 

This seminar engages with key moments in the development of Asian American critical discourses. It takes as its starting point Chih-ming Wang's contention that much of the Asian American critical work that has been produced in Taiwan so far has downplayed or neglected the interdisciplinary and internationalist character of Asian American studies. We will ask: what, then, would constitute an adequate form of engagement with Asian American critical discourses and texts? Our working hypothesis will be that Asian American culture is not a stable pre-constituted object awaiting excavation and recovery; we will instead approach it as a process of contestation and critical reformulation that is not yet settled. Our starting point will be critical accounts of the Asian American movement including the 1968-1969 student strikes at San Francisco State College and UC Berkeley. We will then examine other key moments that may include the following: the controversy over the canonization of Maxine Hong Kingston's _The Woman Warrior_; the murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit; “the fall of the International Hotel” in San Francisco; the heated debates surrounding Ronald Takaki's popular history _Strangers from a Different Shore_; the politics of ethnicity; the near implosion of the Association for Asian American Studies following the granting of a book award for Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel _Blu's Hanging_; debates concerning the internationalization of Asian American studies; and the stakes involved in reading Asian American literature after the catastrophic events in Japan on March 11, 2011. We will conclude our seminar by asking (following a forum published in the _Journal of Asian American Studies_): has Asian American studies failed? Students in this seminar will be expected to read widely across interdisciplinary debates and to write regularly about the texts in our course readings. Students will have a chance to learn about and use key Asian American studies library resources available in Taiwan.