Chloe Starr

What effect did Christianity have on modern Chinese literature, if any, and what sort of Christianity emerges from Chinese Christian literature? Is Endo Shusaku the only Japanese Christian writer (and does Martin Scorsese’s film do justice to his novel Silence)? This course traces the development of a Christian literature in China and Japan from late Imperial times to the end of the twentieth century, with particular focus on the heyday (in China) of the 1920s and ’30s, and on the Japanese side, on Endo’s postwar novels. Using texts available in English, the class examines how Christian ideas and metaphors permeated the literary—and revolutionary—imagination in East Asia. The influence of Christianity on literature came directly through the Bible and church education, and indirectly through translated European and Western literature, but it is rarely clearly in evidence. The course tests the aesthetic visions and construction of the human being in the early Republic, among Japanese samurai in Mexico, and in the martyrs of Nagasaki.