CEAS Colloquium Series
Edo supported one of the most robust publishing industries in the early modern world, and among the most popular genres of woodblock printed materials was the map. In this talk, Karen Wigen will display and discuss printed maps from the Beans collection in Vancouver, asking what they can tell us about how early modern Japanese viewed their mountainous landscape.
This talk will focus on a chariot complex unearthed in Baode county in Shanxi province in China. It argues that the Baode finding can shed new light on many bronze objects excavated in Anyang and collected by the major museums in the United States, Europe and Japan. Some of them reveal a clear Eastern Eurasian origin; some manifest the adaptation of steppe artifacts in the agricultural zone; others exhibit the unmistakable Chinese insignia. Together, these objects illustrate the exciting intercultural relationship between the Eastern Eurasian steppe and China in the late 2nd millennium BCE.
Abstract: (1) The usefulness of philology (the close study of texts) will be urged, and (2) its restoration to full partnership with historical investigation in general will be recommended. (3) Methodologically speaking, it will be noted that the existence of growth texts (such as the Chinese “Spring and Autumn” chronicle and Horace’s Carmina) requires adjustment in how philology operates, and in how history makes use of philology’s results. There will be two extended examples, from the period during which a text is forming, and before it has entered the phase of dissemination by copying,...
The opening passage of The Love suicides at Sonezaki (1703), Chikamatsu first “contemporary-life play” for the puppet theater, describes the heroine, Ohatsu, making a pilgrimage to 33 temples of Kannon in Osaka. In this lecture, Prof. Brownstein discusses the pilgrimage itself, how the passage from the play was originally performed, and its importance for understanding the play as a whole.
Previous studies of China’s modernization have focused on the modern half of the story–the development of factory production and urban culture. Profesor Ko’s current research project seeks to illuminate the “traditional” half of the story, with an emphasis on the resilience of female labor in the domestic economy and artistic innovations in the handicraft industries from the seventeenth to the early twentienth centuries. This talk focuses on the global presentations and domestic reception of Shen Shou, one of the most innovative embroiderers from Suzhou, the center of the silk industry in...
禊祓於文學風景中 ── 看胡蘭成的《中國文學史話》Hu Lancheng, renowned not only as a collaborator during the Sino-Japanese War, but also as the ex-husband of the immortal Eileen Chang, wrote an interesting book on Chinese literary history in 1977. His idiosyncrasy is shown by his prose style as well as his unique observations and interpretations on some major events and their driving forces in the course of the Chinese literary history. It appears that with the writing of Remarks on Chinese Literary History, Hu was in effect trying to cleanse himself of all the sins and guilt of his life journey. Please note this...
The Chinese Buddhist canon, edited in the form of various tripitakas such as the Taisho shinshu daizokyo or the Zhonghua dazang jing, contains hundreds of didactic narratives known as avadana or jataka tales. These stories about the karmic consequences of acts great and small were a fundamental means of propagating Buddhism throughout its development in China. Unfortunately, over time any traces of how these narratives were actually enacted have been effaced by editors. Indeed, given the hundreds of stories compiled, we still know little if nothing about the characteristics, format, and...
In 2008, the Olympic Games will be hosted by the least Westernized nation in the world to yet host them. It will be only the third time the Olympic Summer Games have been held outside the Western hemisphere, and it will be the greatest-ever meeting of East and West in peacetime. Surely this should be a moment to celebrate the interconnected global culture of the 21st century, but there has been a consistently negative reaction in the West centered around criticism of China’s human rights record. When Beijing won the bid and it was shown live on Chinese television, tens of thousands of...
Using the graphic writing of Izumi Kyoka as a starting point, Professor Bialock’s lecture will explore some of the connections between music, ritual, and geomorphic space in medieval Japan. If Heike can be viewed on one level as historical narrative, its musico-ritual basis may also disclose proto-ecological concerns that were tied to the real and perceived effects of human and natural calamities in a time of protracted war.
Hong Kong film production has a history of over 90 years, as long as that in Mainland China. It shared a lot of similarities with Chinese cinema in the early days in its diverse trends in political commitment as well as in entertainment, in addition to a local interest in producing films in the Cantonese dialect and adaptations from the popular Cantonese opera. But since 1949, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, a great number of people, which amounted to a million within a few years, moved from the mainland to Hong Kong. Among the immigrants were a number of film...
Mengxi bitan (Conversations with a Writing Brush) by the 11th-century Chinese scholar Shen Kuo (1031-1095) and writings by several other Chinese writers provide a useful framework within which one can discuss the dialectical relationship between the poisonous and the medicinal, and to examine the curing of the human body as a political metaphor for the governing of a state. Medicine, poison, and the body politic thus become appropriate themes for a comparative study that crosses the boundaries of the East and the West and eventually leads to a new reading of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in...
The ten oldest wooden buildings in East Asia are in Japan, four of them at the monastery Horyuji. Less well-known and less well-documented than Japan’s buildings of the sixth and seventh centuries are China’s ten earliest wooden buildings, dated late eighth to early tenth century. Even less is known about Korea’s first centuries of Buddhist architecture. This talk explores extant architecture, archaeological evidence, and literary descriptions to determine what we really know about the first centuries of Buddhist architecture in East Asia and if longstanding notions of its major monuments...
Please note this lecture will be in Chinese with English translation provided
In Japan, widely tolerated daytime napping or inemuri is frequently associated with and explained by curtailed nocturnal sleep. In the case of ambitious high school students this takes the form of napping in class after many hours of required nighttime study. In this presentation Dr. Steger will attempt to explain the anthropological and sociological background behind this apparent paradox.
While in other works, Professor Childs has argued that physical coercion (rape) was not as common in the literature of the Japanese court as some scholars suggest, in this lecture she will explore the many and varied ways in which male characters use psychologically coercive strategies in their pursuit of romance. Professor Childs will also discuss the corollary issue of women’s reluctance to accept suitors. While the texts often suggest, and readers commonly assume, that women were focused on finding a man they could trust, she will argue that what many women most deeply desired was ...
This lecture will examine a series of ideological conversions (tenkô)that the critic Kamei Katsuichirô (1907-1966) went through from the late 1920s.
This lecture will look at three categories of Chinese writers and their relationships with the Communist Party: the state-sanctioned writers who both legitimize, and benefit from, the political system; the dissident writers who, in refusing to toe the line, face isolation and imprisonment; and finally, the exile writers who escaped to the West but continue to write about political themes. Please note this lecture will be in Mandarin Chinese.
Pages
