Asian Studies

This course offers an introduction to Confucianism in the pre-Qin era from a philosophical perspective looking at experience, rationale and desirability of actions. Topics include the modern significance of Confucianism, interpersonal relations and social achievements, self actualization and self transcendence, life and death, poetry and music, and moderation. The course uses both historical and modern texts.

The course discusses important issues in contemporary Japanese society, fostering a critical stance towards discourses around Japanese society. The course covers topics such as the low birthrate and aging society; rural and urban Japan; gender, sex, marriage, childbirth, and family; rituals, festivals, and traditions; education and media; the military, police and the prison system, and work and leisure. 

This course demonstrates how religious culture is related to contemporary Korean society, focusing on their doctrines, social attitudes, growth, and decline. In addition, the course addresses different sociological perspectives on Korean religious culture and applies them to Korean religious market theoretically and empirically.

The brutal struggle between free will of humanity and historical force has long been a controversial and intriguing subject in the discussions of literature. The point lies not in which side wins eventually, but in exploring what happens in the process of struggle. Viewed from the perspective of literary development, it is quite clear that each different literary movement in postwar Taiwan provides its own unique understanding of the relationship between man and history, between social agency and historical transformation, and ultimately between history and fiction. This course is divided into four parts each dealing with specific historical issues or events. The first deals with how historical figures, such as Song Qingling and Chen Yi, are treaed in fiction. The second part looks at history and politics. The third part discusses how past experiences have been represented from different ideological points of view by different writers. Finally, the course takes a close look at how writers explain the failure (or success) of certain social movements after they have long perished. In short, all the four parts try to explore the complicated interactions among history, human experience, and literary mind.

Ever since the founding of ROC in 1911, war has been a repetitive motif of Chinese history, with millions of Chinese victimized and forced to lose their homes, and even their lives. Therefore, after the Nationalist government relocated itself to Taiwan in 1949, from the 1950s to 1980s, war fiction became an important sub-genre in Anti-communism, Modernism, Nativist-realism, and Post-modernism. There were so many novelists using war as a thematic element in their works that included all the wars from Hsin-hai Revolution to the Vietnamese War. This course is built on the basis of two different histories: the history of wars and that of literature. The first part of this course constructs a historical framework of Modern Chinese Wars, which includes all the wars from Hsin-hai Revolution to the Korean War. The course then demonstrates how novelists from different literary periods deal with the material of war differently: that is to say, we use the plot of war fiction to show how China and Taiwan were influenced socio-politically and economically. This part of course focuses on how Anti-communists reflect upon Chinese Civil Wars, how Modernists rewrote wars experimentally, how Nativist-realists examined the impacts of the Vietnamese War on Taiwan, and how Post-modernism questioned the problem of history with war fiction.

Korea began to adopt Western culture in the nineteenth century and developed their own hybridized music culture into the twentieth-first century. This class examines contemporary Korean musical culture alongside the history of Korea and explores Korean music culture as a global phenomenon. The course covers Korean aesthetic and sensibility in Korean musical culture with select examples from Korean traditional music, Korean’s children music, Korean arts songs of the Colonial Korea period, popular music (K-pop), Korean drama music, Korean film music, and K-classical music.

The course examines popular music, not as isolated artistic texts, but situated within a wider context. The course is organized around the historical survey of popular music in modern Korea. It looks at and listens to a variety of musical genres and styles that emerged and developed in modern Korea from yuhaengga in the colonial era up until k-pop today, by situating them within a wider socio-cultural, political-economic context, as well as in relation to global musical trends.